As you grow through life, friends either grow with you or they grow apart. This is the metaphor of the friend tree.
Early in life you’re thrown together with a group of people to make friends with. Right from the start of nursery, there can be 30 or more people to interact with and buddy up with.
It’s like the trunk of the tree, we’re born as the roots and start growing together in close proximity.
Throughout school you form a group of people to call friends, some close and some that you just hang around with. Never-the-less, you see these people every day and feel part of a large network of human beings.
Then you leave school, and people start branching off in different directions.
Some go to college and university, some start work and others move far away. The branches of the tree start forming, yet they are still large solid branches as you’re often connected to a large group of people.
The friendships gained around this time can feel like the most solid thing you’ll ever have, you’re part of a branch that feels like it’ll always stay together, always growing and twisting through life in the same way.
Yet the branch continues to split up and grow in different directions. Some friends cluster together and start their own branch, and you’re still carrying on the same branch. You watch as the tree splinters and the ever decreasing branches form an intricate network, intertwined but ultimately growing apart.
You move and grow through life thinking the branch will stay large and solid, yet it grows smaller and smaller, and in every direction.
People you thought would always be there, grow in a different way, the branch takes a twist and can never find it’s way back. It’s painful to split away, but the tree has to keep growing.
Everyone is growing in some way. The tree is always striving to move forward towards the light, it just moves in different ways but at the root we are all the same.
