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Note: This article is a follow-up to the piece I wrote a number of months ago titled A Quiet Place: Using shared silence as the vehicle to nurture existing relationships and to foster new ones.

More than a year ago, I wrote about a tactic I implemented to nurture my friendships at a time when it had become ever harder to make time for those not living in our household –due to the post-pandemic economic realities hitting most, if not all, households. The solution was simply to copy what students do in their study groups and, as adults, to quietly work in a shared space on our tasks and the demands of our separate jobs.

What I have come to discover, as the months have gone on, is that some of these friendships and relationships I have been fostering through this tactic have gained a character trait I shared only with my childhood friends.

Childhood friends are rare, and for most people, something that they have never been able to carry into their adult lives. Gone are the years when we would die within the same blast radius of a Super Soaker from which we went to elementary school.

One of the reasons why it is incredibly hard to make friends as adults is that we lose the capacity to get lost in our own heads while in the company of others. We are far too task-oriented and devoted to supporting those in our lives. We no longer have the time to go on a long bike ride with a friend and equally get lost in our thoughts, enjoy the surroundings, and have our own entirely separate internal monologues.

“What are you thinking about,” asked a friend during my first year of university. After our last lecture on Wednesday’s, we made it a tradition that year to go to the nearby mall together. Often, as we sat in the food court, I would go deep into thought about the day’s classes and plan my evening ahead accordingly. This was my first taste of what friendships would mostly become as I left adolescence and entered the always-on-the-go life of adulthood.

My friend did not do as I did. Instead of sitting quietly and either thinking or daydreaming, he sat, mainly staring at me. He and many others who would come after him needed to extract something from the outing and interaction. They are and never have been content to just… be. Now, with friends, there often needs to be a television nearby or a shared activity for adults to tolerate silence between them.

As children, we were free to get lost within the worlds in our minds while in the company of others. One may have been daydreaming about what they were going to ask for Christmas, while the other would be stuck in a doom loop of thought regarding having to go home where their abusive older sibling resided, as they habitually checked for the butterknife they stole from the school cafeteria in case they needed to defend themselves in the middle of the night.

With the few childhood friends I still have, we have not lost the ability to simply sit in silence without any need of external stimulus to keep us occupied. This recently led me to believe that this phenomenon is not due to the loss of an inherent ability linked to childhood, but rather one that centres on security and being unconditionally comfortable and being open to be ourselves within said company.

Over the last year, I have come to foster friendships to reach this level of comfort through the routine and tactics outlined in this article’s predecessor. I’ve found that with a select number of individuals, we have become capable of sitting in a shared space and not talking for hours now. I was not expecting this to happen, but the safety that had been nurtured over dozens of hours of quietly working in a shared space allowed us not to ever question the other person or their motives or give in to the unbearable need to know what the person next to us is thinking.

We, and by this, I mean people who are lucky enough to live in a region free of conflict, violence, and a degraded currency that results in proteins no longer being a part of our diets, are incredibly lonely and bored. People in the West, like everywhere else, are experiencing high levels of loneliness, and they are resorting to various forms of clubs, meetups and gatherings that are fuelled by the internet. These clubs all centre around a common interest, and those who sign up, on the face of it, hope to meet others who have similar interests. Very soon, they discover that those who share similar interests are not necessarily compatible with them, or even good people, as it turns out with disturbing frequency. This is the main issue with attempting to build meaningful friendships through common interests. We tend to identify ourselves with what we hold dear and mistakenly elevate that area of interest to be corresponding with good character.

I have been to many of these gatherings, and though at times people do sit quietly next to each other while working on an activity, significant and sincere friendships rarely arise in these environments.

All of this has resulted in a year enriched with many more deep, personal, and healthy friendships, while fortifying those that already existed. If I could give anyone a gift, it would be the patience to invest in others, to wade through those who naturally leave our lives, and to find those we feel comfortable sitting in silence with, without any sense of disquiet.