My kids are getting older and we are wading into the “tricky” music phase: too young for free reign and too old for Kidz Bop! Ed Sheeran is the latest obsession. Since I enjoy his music, I’m choosing to turn a blind eye to some lyrics (they won’t figure out what he’s really talking about, right?!?!) and have been helping them curate a “parent approved” playlist… I digress. As “Castle on the Hill” was playing for the umpteenth time this week, I found myself transported back in time:
to the friendships,
the memories,
that familiarity that only comes with time…
the friendships of youth: my own castle on the hill.
The friendships of youth are built on discovery and mistakes, of self-exploration and phases. The friendships of youth are built on the gift of time. A chapter in our life when time was all we had. Time to develop friendships that would span wherever life would take us in our own journey: our own castle on the hill.
I am so lucky to still consider many friends from my youth good friends. We haven’t all taken the same life paths. We don’t all live geographically close. We don’t even necessarily have a lot in common, anymore. And yet, when I am with them, I am home. There is a connection that cannot be replicated from those relationships formed in my teens and young adulthood when I was still discovering myself. They know me in a way that my adult friendships (whose connection is unique as well) cannot. They know me from when I was immature, wide-eyed, unworldly, and unrefined as a human. Yet, they still choose me as a friend. For that gift, I’m forever thankful.
Now that I am a parent, I look forward to seeing what friendships of youth my children will have. I pray that when they are my age, they can look at their friends and see home, a place where they are known for the whole of the person they have been and will be, their own castle on the hill.
