You've Got a Friend

I've now had two full weeks of what I like to call non-employment. It's been a bit of a roller coaster -- sometimes I feel really grateful for the freedom, the space, the additional time to spend with my kids -- and at other times I feel really at sea, and start to wonder about my place in this world and fret about how I'm going to continue to pay my bills. I didn't know until I left just how significant the structure of having a place to go every day was as an anchor in my life. I love the metaphor of the anchor -- it's so easy to see how being "tied down" can be great when you want to stay in one place and equally how important it is to pull up the anchor when you want to move. And I really needed to move. Where this ship is headed, I don't rightly know, but I do know that one of the things keeping it afloat is the loving support of my friends.

Not surprisingly, I feel even more at sea when my kids aren't here, and this weekend was the first one since I left my job when my kids have been at their Dad's all weekend. I was initially a bit worried about how I was going to get through it, but I needn't have worried. Without doing any real planning, I ended up getting to cook dinner both Friday and Saturday nights for/with the assistance of dear friends. In both cases, the food was tasty, but I was nourished to an even greater extent by their company.

As you may know, Carole King wrote this song and James Taylor made it famous. This video shows them singing it together -- and you can just see that they have a really beautiful friendship. (I bet they never slept together, but that's the subject of an entirely different post.) My favorite moment in the video is at the very end, when they look at each other and repeat:

Ain't it good to know (x7)

Yeah, yeah, yeah

You've got a friend

It sure is...