The view from my office

I have an internal office window at Tribe.

It looks out onto the space, which means I have a particular view of what happens here. Not the big events or the carefully arranged moments, but the everyday ones.

Simplicity

I often take a photograph through my office window. Because I am in my office, people mostly don’t know I am taking them. They aren’t looking at the camera. Nobody is posing. There is no “just one more for socials.”

They are simply there. Talking, laughing, working alongside each other. Sitting together, arriving, leaving and pausing for a conversation that turns into something longer.

Tribe has had hundreds, probably thousands, of different people pass through it over the years. People arrive with their own lives, their own work, their own reasons for being here. Some stay for years. Some for a few months. Some become friends. Some become collaborators. Some simply have a conversation with someone they might never otherwise have met.

And from my little office window, I get to see these tiny connections happening.

They are rarely remarkable in the moment. Nobody would probably think to photograph them if they were standing right there.

But when I look at them afterwards, I see something much bigger.

I see people making a life alongside other people. I see belonging being built in small, almost invisible ways. I see the hundreds of different people who make up this place, briefly intersecting with one another.

What gives friendship somewhere to live?

I’ve been asking people where they find their friends as adults.

I asked how as an adult, where do you make friends? A woman who I don’t know, wrote back describing a group that started at the end of lockdown, when a few friends began showing up for someone who’d lost her husband to covid. They called it Fizz Friday. As restrictions lifted, the group didn’t disperse, it grew. Some of them started hula hooping in the park, a good excuse to be outside and six feet apart. Some took up cold water swimming at a spot nearby. People came and went, but a core of eight remained, joined by others who dipped in and out. She called them her Coven.

What strikes me isn’t the loss that started it. It’s what happened after. The reason for meeting changed; grief, then hooping, then swimming, but the meeting itself never stopped needing a reason. Every time the old structure stopped fitting, they built a new one. The friendship didn’t survive because the feeling was strong enough to carry itself. It survived because someone kept finding it a new shape to live in.

What time gives

I have friends I see once, maybe twice a year. When we do, it’s immediate, no small talk runway, no catching up on the catching up. We pick up mid-sentence, as if the months in between were a held breath rather than a gap. I leave those conversations lit up, already looking forward to the next one, whenever it happens to land.

And I have friends I see every week, sometimes without much planning at all. It’s easier than easy, a text, a coffee, a walk. Nothing about it needs effort or occasion. We don’t have big catch-ups because there’s nothing to catch up on; we were just there, a few days ago, in the middle of something ordinary.

For a long time I thought the second kind was the real friendship and the first kind was something lesser, a friendship running on memory, kept alive by nostalgia rather than presence. But the once-a-year ones don’t feel thin. They feel concentrated. And the weekly ones aren’t better because they’re frequent; they’re built out of an entirely different material, made of proximity and repetition rather than depth stored up between visits.

Small spaces

Maybe that’s what I’m seeing through my office window. Not just people being together, but people continually making the small structures that allow them to be together. A coffee, a walk, a Friday night, a shared project, a cold swim, a conversation that was supposed to last ten minutes and somehow lasted an hour. All of these things give friendship somewhere to live.

Because that’s what we underestimate about friendship. It isn’t only about finding our people. It’s about continuing to make space for them, and being willing to let the space change shape without assuming that change means it’s ending.

Sometimes that place is a shared workplace, or a weekly coffee, or a Friday night ritual. Sometimes it’s nothing more than knowing there’s someone at the other end of the phone who will understand exactly why you’re calling.

Here’s to all the friends, and to the places, rituals and little reasons that keep giving our friendships somewhere to live.

Thanks for reading,
Dani

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