Friends are Good Medicine

written by Sharon Edge Martin
photos provided

    Exercise—doing water aerobics, taking yoga classes, running, or taking long walks—is an essential part of your self-love tool kit. I walk thirty minutes to an hour every day. My spouse and I take yoga classes and do Tai Chi.
    When we started locking down in early 2021, we told ourselves that we could do yoga at home. I would occasionally do my Tai Chi routines, but the sessions got farther and farther apart. We seldom got out the yoga mats. It just wasn’t the same without our friends in the classes.
    Almost everything goes better with friends.
    We are back in our yoga classes, and I teach Tai Chi at the gym one day a week. It’s good to be back, but we lost almost a year of progress.
    A friend of mine and I masked up and met in town at least once a week to walk and chat outdoors. We didn’t let the weather stop us. Both the friendship and the walks were lifelines. I took daily walks at home, but I had those weekly walks to look forward to.
    I’m a preacher’s daughter. I attended four different schools between first and sixth grades. It was easier to be friendly in a superficial way than it was to leave close friends. I relied on books to fill the gap.
    In seventh grade, I put down roots. I was reminded how painful it is to leave good friends when, the summer before my junior year in high school, Dad moved the family to take on a job at a new church. But I was an adult when I really grasped that books couldn’t replace friends any more than friends could replace books. I needed them both.
    Almost everything I do is richer because of friends.
    I met the Lindas in a water aerobics class. It didn’t take us long before we started trading recipes. Working out in the water makes you hungry. Before long, a group of us, dubbed the Water Buffalo by one of our instructors, started scheduling regular dinner dates. Eventually the pool closed down and we began to scatter, but the Lindas and I found other things to do together.
    The three of us are basket weavers. Again, we found it was much more satisfying to meet and weave than it was to weave by ourselves. These days, we usually meet in Linda C’s kitchen. Wherever we meet, we don’t worry about providing food or tidying up. All that matters is a clean floor, because you don’t want to drag wet reed across a dirty one.
    The Lindas also knit and crochet. They take turns meeting in the homes of a group they call the Knit Wits. 
My alone time is spent writing. Writing is a solitary endeavor, but the poets who attend the monthly poetry reading I host at Tidewater Winery felt the pain of the shutdown. You should have seen the enthusiasm of the crowd when we decided it was time to meet again in person.
    Friends are a gift, and we mustn’t take for granted the health benefits of our friendships. My friends and I kept up with each other by phone and with social media, but even that couldn’t compete with the joy of getting together.
    What do you and your friends enjoy doing together? Is it time to schedule a play date?