Obligation

Pop Quiz, hot shot:

You're on your way out the door one day to attend a play with a friend. Before you go, you discover that your roommate is in intense pain and is about to go to the hospital with her boyfriend because she thinks she has appendicitis.

Your choices are these:

1) Go to the play. You've already blown off your friend twice over the past two days, and feel bad about doing so. You realize that if you blow them off again, it's going to cause a wound in the friendship

2) Go to the hospital with your roommate and her boyfriend. Sure, she already has help, but you'd feel terrible being "the guy that abandoned her in her time of need"

What do you do, kid? What do you do?

It seems that one of the rules of friendship is that you're bound to disappoint each other sooner or later. There's always going to be some event you can't go to that they really wanted you to be there for, or some occasion where two friends want you to be with them at the same time and you have to choose which one to please and which one to disappoint.

It's a fact of life that you can't please everyone. I've learned that the hard way time and again over the past several years of my life. I'm a guy that wants a lot of friends and a lot of good, healthy relationships. But...the more friends you take on, the more of a chance you have of not being able to please all, or even most of them. Hell, even if you only had two friends there would be times when you would have to choose between them.

Sucks, doesn't it? If I could have been at that play and in the hospital at the same time, I would have been. But I couldn't, so I had to choose. Did I make the right choice? Who knows. There's no use dwelling on "could haves" and "should haves". But...I did end up making one friend happy and not supporting the other.

I make the same kind of choices every day. Many times a day, in fact. Do I answer my phone when I'm supposed to be working? Do I tell one friend to hold on while another one calls? Do I make plans with someone for the weekend, knowing that two or three other people will likely want to hang out with me on that day as well?

I make those choices. I never feel good about them, but I make them. I probably have friends who wonder why I don't talk to them as often as I like or see them as often as they ask me to. The reason for that is simple. My life is very much like a party that I'm hosting. I invited everyone, and therefore I have an obligation to divide my time between each of my guests. If I just hang out with one person, everyone else will leave. Sure I'll have a best friend, but it will be my only friend.

So...I have an obligation to each of my friends. I don't always fulfill that obligation as well as I wish I had. In fact, I seldom do. But I try. To some I'm elusive. To some I appear as a loner. To some I may seem too busy. But what I really am is blessed. Blessed by the ability to be a part of so many people's lives, yet cursed with the inability to get as close to any one of them as I wish I could be.

The nature of who I am and what I want will likely always leave me stretched like this. Pulled in fourteen directions at once. The truth is that I like it. I love to be surrounded by creative minds and yearning hearts and strong, colorful people of all stripes and backgrounds.

But...I do wish I had more hours in the day, and more of an ability to fulfill my obligation to each of the people I care about.