In our ‘time poor’ world (see In Praise of Slow) real friendships can be hard to come by.

So many of us live such busy lives that we don’t have time to just ‘hang’ with people. And yet its actually a prerequisite for friendship that we spend time hanging, chatting about nothing in particular… just being comfortable with each other, talking small, watching kids play, vegging.

Its been a ‘hanging out’ weekend. Friday night M & A came round for dinner, a couple of people whose company we really enjoy, but who we wouldn’t say we know real well yet. We hung out for a few hours, chatting eating dinner, drinking wine and watching our kids run around.

At 9.00pm when M & A went home I noticed that just across the road M & R were sitting in their garage with M & T having a few drinks. It’d been a while since we had caught up so it seemed like a great opportunity to ‘hang’. So I wandered over and sat down and chatted for the next couple of hours. It was a lot of fun!

Yesterday we caught some time alone as well as seeing family. After a busy ‘people week’ it was good to have the space.

Then today was spent ‘hanging’ again. K’s 2nd birthday party saw us hanging out for a few hours this morning, then this afternoon M & I go see Cinderella Man before Andrew & Jo come for dinner and we hang out some more.

I’m not a big fan of small talk, (even though I have learnt the art fairly well) and as an introvert people wear me out, but I have come to realise that unless we actually make the time to hang out and do the ‘small talk’ we will not grow a friendship of any significance.

Big things are simply small things that have grown.