My friend recently told me that "time move much faster than [he] give[s] it credit for." Specifically, that "all the stories that are actually being told to one another are being created so fast."
My instant reaction was to construct an analogy! But rather than build one from scratch, I remembered the adage that one should build relationships on firm foundations or some such.
So let's take this "foundations" analogy a little further, and say that as we live our lives, we build tall buildings up into the sky, one floor at a time. Then the "foundations" for our relationships are the most recent floors we've built. If we create even one floor poorly, our structure is unsound and our past may always come back to haunt us. I think of the stories we tell each other as being floor plans, maybe architectural standards. We build our floor, and extract the ideas that we've had in building it into plans, the stories we tell others. The hope being that others will incorporate our ideas into their lives and buildings.
Perhaps we do this because we wish to be remembered, or to create legacies which will outlive us. Perhaps we want others' buildings to be strong, so they will not crumble as ours have in the past. Perhaps we want others' buildings to be familiar, to work together on pursuing zoning ordinances (the struggle against nature), or to connect up our phone lines.
When we have similar foundations (i.e. the past few floors) then our shared floor plans make sense. Staircases are in the right place, the water pipes hook up, we don't put game rooms right above or below bedrooms. Some of our connections may bypass floors; perhaps a cups-and-string phone line or a more sophisticated PA system. Maybe shared wiring so that TVs from different floors can observe what the others are watching. But these connections are less common. Having a single shared floor plan makes it much easier to share further floor plans. Having multiple shared floors makes it seamless.
My friend claimed that it takes about three years to get to know someone very well. So we could say that 3 years is maybe three floors? I can't imagine building connections further than that. Or perhaps it is more like 36 floors, and due to a fluke of the human condition buildings taller than 36 floors tend to fall over and need to be rebuilt. Being rebuilt doesn't really feel continuous, and though the flow of time isn't always continuous it's not discontinuous in nice 3-year-long chunks (though high school and college are nice 4-year-long chunks! If you're lucky). Perhaps part of the building process is remodeling, condensing the functions of lower floors and then adding new floors at the top.
The lowest floors are the hardest to remodel, because the whole structure relies on them. They are the most powerful factors in the building's stability, and they are the most likely to be out of tune with how we want to build in the future. Similarly, our early childhood is built mostly by others, and the issues we develop there continue to plague us for ages on.
Though our highest floors are always shared with our recent friends, we seek to build more similar foundations. But we cannot change the deepest foundations, which makes it easier to often seek out people similar to us.
Some people have a powerful desire to understand their own foundations, and with good reason. The mysterious basements of our lives have a grand effect on our overall structure. We shove all kinds of crap into our basement, and try to forget about it. These things often get moldy, or attract ants, and we eventually need to deal with them or the whole foundation will be a rotting mess.
But of course the original motivation for this metaphor was the speed with which friendships seem to fall apart.
As it seems to me, if the depth of a friendship is the number of floors down you can rely on the architecture, the solidity of the foundation, then it only takes one floor out of place for the whole thing to be lost. And the remodeling process works more intently on the lower floors, so it may take some time before the dissonance can be repaired.
It is easier by far to destroy than to create.
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