When I was a kid, there was a wonderful little ritual that required no planning, no advance notice, and certainly no appointment. You simply walked over to a friend’s house, knocked on the door, and asked the most natural question in the world:
“Can Jimmy come out and play?”
Sometimes Jimmy answered the door himself. Other times, his mother appeared and informed you that Jimmy had to finish his chores first. Or perhaps he was grounded. Whatever the answer, nobody thought your unannounced visit was strange. It was simply what friends did.
And somewhere along the journey from childhood to adulthood, we stopped doing it.
Think about that. When was the last time you spontaneously knocked on a friend’s door just because you wanted to spend some time together? No particular agenda. No business to conduct. No favor to request. Just the simple pleasure of another person’s company.
I have a best friend I’ve known since 1982. More than four decades of friendship! We remain as close as ever, at least in spirit. Yet, curiously, we rarely see each other socially anymore. He’s also my financial planner, so most of our interactions revolve around investments, retirement accounts, and other matters that would have bored us senseless when we were younger.
We both lead busy lives. There are responsibilities, obligations, schedules, and seemingly endless demands on our time. Getting together socially has become something requiring coordination, as though friendship were another appointment to squeeze into an already overcrowded calendar.
And I find that a little sad.
Of course, growing up necessarily involves change. Childhood affords us a freedom that adulthood gradually replaces with responsibility. We acquire careers, families, mortgages, and other commitments. Our lives become more complicated, and spontaneity becomes something of a luxury.
But I wonder whether, in becoming responsible adults, we’ve inadvertently surrendered something precious.
Perhaps the real difference isn’t that we have less time. Perhaps it’s that we’ve come to regard unstructured time with friends as less important than all the things competing for our attention.
As children, we didn’t need a reason to be together. Being together was the reason.
Maybe that’s the lesson worth recovering.
Friendship, after all, isn’t merely a relationship we possess. It’s an experience we must continue to cultivate. And relationships, like gardens, can survive periods of neglect—but they rarely flourish because of it.
I suppose I’m not really longing to be a child again. I’m longing for something childhood understood instinctively: that sometimes the most meaningful thing we can do with another human being is absolutely nothing in particular.
Maybe one of these days I’ll call my old friend, put aside the financial questions, and ask him something I haven’t asked anyone in decades.
“Hey, can you come out and play?”
