Well people come and go in our lives and no one stays forever...

...New loves come and new priorities and new responsibilities and new lives and death. We do what we can with people with the time we have with them. You come and go in and out of others’ lives, and if you’re lucky, you will change them before they are gone. For, they will be gone, sooner or later, whether you’re ready to move on without them or not. If you’re lucky, you’ll move on knowing that you have left your mark on their lives, that they carry a bit of you with them – knowing that you have not forgotten, and they haven’t either.


So I wrote that back in February. Except it's not completely right. Yes, you're lucky if you change someone before you leave their life (or they leave yours). But I should have placed more emphasis on, "If you're lucky, you'll move on knowing that you have left your mark..." Knowing. It's so hard to know that you've changed someone's life, yet most of us need that knowledge - that reassurance that our time was not wasted.

"We do what we can with people with the time we have with them." I sort of found out this year that often, that time is a lot shorter than you'd think, and when its over, all you have is your memories of it. And it's hard to hold on to those. You want to let them go, and in some ways, you need to. Memories are things of the past and you can't hold on to them like they're the present. But you can't forget them, even if all evidence of their occurrence has dissipated. Even if you can't recognize the changes you inflicted, you have to remember that at one time, they were there, and even if you can't see them any more, they could still be there. You can't let yourself feel like you wasted your time with anyone, and if you do, you have to ride it out and get past it.

"Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods."
- C. S. Lewis

"Without doubt there's no free will, without free will there's no humanity, without humanity there's no divinity."
- God, 'Joan of Arcadia'

Faith is like a shape-shifting factotum. It looks different all the time, and it does so many different things. It pops up everywhere. There are so many different kinds of faith, and when you get down to it, I guess you could say that everything is faith. Well, memories are faith too. Holding onto memories is trusting that the past did happen; in this case, it's trusting that you did really do something worthwhile. It's easy to say that you want to do something to "change the hearts of men," even if it's only fleeting, but it's harder to hold onto that memory of what you did and continually gain strength from it after it's gone. Often, it seems, the effects of what you do really are short-lived, even if we'd like to think that everything we do is going to change people's lives forever, including our own. Perhaps it does change people lives forever, but if it does, it's often subtle, like a scar or blemish covered over with make-up: invisible and unknown to everyone but the person who inflicted it and the afflicted. After a while, it fades and the person seems to forget it was ever there, but he can't ever truly forget - the mark has been made. Forgetting the marks you've made on others is a crisis of faith.

"Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death."
- Miguel de Unamuno

"Skepticism is the beginning of faith."
- Oscar Wilde

We make marks in all sorts of ways, on our friends more than anyone else. On the most basic level, our best friends bear our marks more than anyone else - those friends that we can trust with everything, who are always there for us, to listen, comfort, help, cheer up, or just be around. You don't have to be a person's best friend, though, to be a good friend. Sometimes you don't need someone who's going to listen to your problems and talk you through them and help you out - sometimes you need someone who's not going to ask you any questions and will just take your mind off things. Sometimes you don't need someone who's going to be particularly kind and sensitive and thoughtful - you need someone who's not going to treat you any differently than normal. Sometimes, a good friend is simply one who will give you what you need - or, rather, what you think you need - what you want.

Elliot's thoughts: Listening to Molly made me realize a person doesn't have to be perfect to be exactly what you need.
- Scrubs

I guess it comes down to what kind of friend you want to be. Do you want to give friends what they want, what sometimes they only think they need, or do you want to give them what they really need? The problem is, people are more apt to like you if you simply give them what they want all the time. Giving people what they need, what is best for them in the long run, isn't always the most popular route, and it's usually not the easiest. If you want to give them what they really need, you have to be sharp. You have to be able to tell when they really need to be distracted from when they're just running away from something. You have to be able to tell when intervening is going to help and when it's going to push them to the edge. You won't get it right every time, but hey, you've got to try. Right?

And all at once the crowd begins to sing
Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same...
The Fray

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