Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Action 237 - Be More Like Andrea.

Shocking revelation time. I'm not perfect. "What?!" you ask, stunned at my candor. I know, I know. It's almost impossible to process, but you must. It's true. I'm a great guy, a good person, and a wonderful friend. But I'm not perfect. I'm working on it, though. Specifically, I need to be a better friend to the people I care about.

Action 237 - Be More Like Andrea. Yep, it really is as simple as that. If I want to be a better friend, I just need to watch how Andrea does it.

This is Andrea.



So, what qualifies her to teach Friendship 101? Because she gets it. She knows what it means to be a friend. She knows that it isn't just the big actions and dramatic gestures. She knows that being a friend means paying attention to the little things. It means remembering that your friend is interviewing for a job and calling them the day before to wish them well. It means hearing that a friend's relative is seriously ill and calling to ask, "is there anything I can do to help?"

And it's more than that. It's caring about your friend enough to fly all the way across the country to be there cheering when he crosses the most important finish line of his life. It's reading a friend's blog at 2am and reaching out immediately to say, "I am glad for our friendship." It's about driving three hours through traffic to be there in person and ask, "are you okay?"

Andrea makes being a friend seem almost automatic. She knows what to do and when and, more importantly, she follows through. And that is the difference between Andrea and most people I know... myself absolutely included. We all think of things we can do to help those around us, and many times, we do. We reach out and we are the friends we hope to be. But too often, we allow the craziness of our lives to push friendships to the side. Somehow, despite a very busy life, near-constant travel, and friendships from coast to coast and continent to continent, Andrea still manages to make each of us, her friends, feel valuable and necessary and important.

That's the sort of friend I want to be. And I think that's an action worth taking.

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