Yel Kaye – Travel Blog, Writing and Photography

I have often asked myself how my transient ways affect my ability to have meaningful friendships. Leaving travel aside, I have moved cities 8 times in my life (Ottawa-Palo Alto-Ottawa-Edmonton-Camrose-Edmonton-Kingston-Toronto-Ottawa) and that does not even count the places I have lived for shorter periods of time (France, Burkina Faso, Guatemala…)

I only really have three friends (that I still see) that knew me when I was a teenager. Most of my closest friends have only known me for a couple years. I make friends very easily, but it also seems like they come and go a lot.

Someone once told me that there are no friendships as deep as those you’ve known since childhood or at least a very long time. In that case, I’m screwed. How can I possibly have “deep” friendships if I flit around the world like some butterfly with ADHD?

But another friend told me his philosophy, and this I liked much more.

His theory was that friendships can renew. You can not see or even talk with someone for a very long time, but if you have a great, meaningful time with them, the friendship goes back to where it was.

(He also thought this was on a “timer” – you need to “renew” the friendship within five years of the last meaningful time together. When you renew the friendship, the 5-year timer restarts. I don’t know how much I agree with this part, but in principle I like his theory.)

I think this is the best way for me to reconcile travel and friendship. People come and go all the time in our lives anyways, so the past and the future is not what creates “meaning.” It is the present that matters: can I talk with this friend easily? Can I share whatever I want to talk about? Can I have fun and laugh a lot? If I have a problem, can I rely on this person?

But this doesn’t mean that the future is irrelevant – I like to think that real friends are those that you can’t see for years, but when you do see them, you are as close as ever.

I think, then, that travel and moving around so much has actually made me lucky when it comes to friendship. I have good friends in almost every major Canadian city, many places in the U.S. and around the world as well. I have met very many interesting people in my life, and I love how they enter my life again when our paths cross.

One of my favourite things is connecting with friends in far-off places. There is nothing like seeing a familiar old friend in unfamiliar surroundings.

I guess I will not be able to have “traditional” friendships: go to high school together, hang out through university, be each others’ bridesmaids, babysit each others’ kids…

But maybe I am getting more… or at least something different and equally meaningful.

John (friend from Queen’s) and I in Panama, where we met up for a few days.

While in D.C. for the inauguration, I met up with these three friends from Spanish school in Xela.

Icker and Angela – both friends from my Masters program – arguing in a bar in Mexico City. We all happened to be in Mexico at the same time – Icker lives there, Angela was at a summer school, and I arrived from Guatemala.

I got to spend a week hanging out with my university friend Alison in Ghana. I was on my way to Burkina, she was working in Accra.