transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Hello, it's your host Andrew here. If you're enjoying Send Me To Sleep so far, and you'd like to help support the show, the best way to do that is Send Me To Sleep Premium. Over there, you'll get ad-free episodes, as well as access to all of our bonus episodes. You can find a link to a seven-day free trial in the description notes. Thanks so much for listening, and here's just a few ads before the show begins. Hey, it's Andrew here, and I'm excited to share with you the newest show from Slumber Studios. It's called Sleepy History, and it's exactly what it sounds like. Intriguing stories, people, mysteries, and events from history, delivered in a supremely calming atmosphere. Explore the legend of El Dorado. See what life was like for Roman gladiators. Uncover the myths and mysteries of Stonehenge. You'll find interesting but relaxing episodes like these on sleepy history. And the same great production quality you've come to know and love from Send Me To Sleep. So give it a listen, and perhaps you'll have another way to get a good night's rest. Just search Sleepy History in your preferred podcast player.

Speaker 2:
[01:16] Hey, it's Thomas here. I'm the host of Get Sleepy, another sleep-inducing podcast from the Slumber Studios network. On Get Sleepy, you'll find hundreds of original bedtime stories and meditations to fall asleep to. Some of our listener favorites are our trips to the Rainy Day Bakery, our Sleepy History series, and our adaptations of classic tales like Beauty and the Beast. Everything is designed with your sleep in mind. So if you're looking for another great way to ease into a restful night's slumber, then just search for Get Sleepy on your favorite podcast player. I'll see you there, my friends. Hey, it's Thomas here. I'm the host of Deep Sleep Sounds, another sleep-inducing podcast from the Slumber Studios network. On the Deep Sleep Sounds podcast, you'll find hundreds of episodes featuring relaxing nature soundscapes, sleep music, calming white noise, and much more. Everything is designed with your sleep in mind. So, if you're looking for another great way to ease into a restful night's slumber, then just search Deep Sleep Sounds on your favorite podcast player. I'll see you there, my friends.

Speaker 1:
[02:41] I read the other day, something that has become one of my favorite facts now, and that is that Harry Houdini, the famous illusionist and escape artist, was actually really good friends with Arthur Conan Doyle, the famed writer of Sherlock Holmes, amongst other. Famous novels. And I really like that fact, I think because it gives me this feeling of, I don't really know how to put it, you might have better words for it than me. Sort of like a reality check, I suppose, like it puts history into context for me a little bit. Sometimes you can imagine these famous figures as existing in isolation. You never really think about them interconnecting, but then, you think, well, they existed in the same time, in the same place, so why couldn't they interact into mingle? And it's really interesting to me because they both formed a friendship around their love of the mystical, the occult, and especially spiritualism and this idea of the afterlife. But they had radically different ideas about its legitimacy, which I guess is kind of exemplary of friendship overall, isn't it? How two people can be so different and have radically different views about the world and yet for some reason, they just come together and it works. Now the sad thing about Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle is that eventually, their differences would mean that they have a pretty bitter falling out. Arthur Conan Doyle was a staunch believer in spiritualism and magic in general. He was a true believer in make believe, which some people find quite shocking, I suppose, considering he is the creator of what has come to be known almost as the archetype of logical deduction, Sherlock Holmes. But if you read a lot of Sherlock Holmes, then you will see infusions of the mystical in his work. But after the loss of his son, Arthur Conan Doyle really doubled down on his firm belief in the afterlife and in seances. Whilst Harry Houdini, he was very interested in this world and its ideas, but in a more distant way. He actually spent most of his life trying to debunk a lot of these tricksters, these hokesters that would purport to be in some way clairvoyant or psychic. And Houdini, during a certain part of his career, did this very openly, publicly, which Arthur Conan Doyle took fairly personally. He saw it as a personal attack against his own beliefs. And they had a huge falling out about it. Conan Doyle was so enamored with Houdini and what he could do. He himself was even fervent in stating to him that he truly believed what he did was real magic. Funny that even in the face of your friend telling you that what he does is all illusion, and you still believe probably the sign of a great magician. All of this makes me wonder, gets me thinking, running over the idea of what a friend really is, you know. I'm sure you must have some friends. Sometimes it can feel like we don't have any friends in the world, depending on your circumstance, the time you are in your life. But even when you feel like that, I think there probably, there probably must be someone out there who considers you a friend. And that's gotta be a comforting thought, I think. Even if you feel like that's not even true. That's why I'm here, hey? Happy to talk, although in a very one-sided way. That's what makes friends kind of funny, you know? They can be all kinds of things. They can be really close. They can be almost passing in existence, perhaps fleeting, perhaps long-held. And they can mean different things and do different things. Sometimes people really seem like friends, but they're not so much. After a time you realize that they weren't really what you would consider a friend. Sometimes you realize that they're actually not what anyone would consider to be a friend. It reminds me of my childhood. Being in the playground, as a really young boy, I think I must have been six or seven years old. And you know how friendship is when you're at that age. You're just still trying to figure out how to interact with people at all. You all are as children, and in that way I suppose your friendships are kind of, I don't want to say vapid, but they can be a little shallow. Although, you might hear me say that and think that I'm being pessimistic or skeptical or cynical. Maybe I am. Perhaps, you could just describe them as simple, easy, uncomplicated. At that age, you can simply ask someone to play with you, and they might say yes, they might say no, but there's nothing too nuanced about it, which is perhaps a better way to deal with making friends than we as adults sometimes convince ourselves is the best way. Sometimes, I lay awake at night, thinking back to a particular young boy from my childhood who wanted to be my friend. I remember his name precisely, though I haven't seen him in many, many years. And I'll call him Sam, for the sake of anonymity, wherever he may be and whatever he may be doing in the modern time. But I really, really didn't want to be friends with Sam, and it wasn't his fault. If anything, he was too good a friend. He would come to find me every playtime. He'd want to hug me often, and I didn't want to be hugged. I've always been quite careful and protective of my personal space, especially so as a young boy, I think, and I found it too much. And looking back, as an adult, yeah, I think I probably had the right to protect my space. But there was nothing wrong with that young boy, he was simply different. He showed affection in a different way. And I guess he just needed a different kind of friend. And like I say, when you're that young, it's all a bit too simple. And you're thinking more about yourself than you are about the other person when you're making friends. Whatever it is that you happen to see in someone that makes you particularly like them enough to want to become their friend, often it's more about what you see in yourself reflected by them than who they are actually. And I say that it is a floor of youth, but thinking about it more, I think that's something many people do even in adulthood. Not just in friendship, but in relationships as well. Because, thinking about it, you first meet someone, which is often when you decide whether you like them or not. You know, after a short 10 or 15 minute conversation. You haven't had enough time to discover the depth of an individual. You're making a quick and cursory assessment about whether you like them or not. And that can't be based on what they've said entirely. It has to be more about how you interpret who they are. And we often build so many assumptions on to a person. We want to see ourselves in them so much. That we sort of build up a belief that they're someone that they're not. I think this is why sometimes you can be friends with someone. You can be in a relationship with someone. And things be going so well to start, and then after a while could be weeks, months or even years. You slowly realize that this person is not who you initially believe them to be. Or perhaps it doesn't come across like that. Perhaps you sort of start to feel like maybe they changed in that time. But really they didn't. Really, that's who they were all along. And you're just catching up with dispelling the illusions you've created around them. And that's nobody's fault. So, one day, young Sam comes to me in the playground, as he did every day for weeks since he decided he wanted to be my friend, looking to give me a hug and a kiss. And the adult me looking back, if I had the opportunity to give me advice, I would say that it's perfectly fine to ask a friend to not do something if you don't want them to. And I would have said to myself, tell young Sam that you can play together, but you don't have to hug and you don't have to have a kiss. But that's not what I did. I told him that morning that I just didn't want to be his friend anymore. And he cried and cried. Now, I certainly felt bad before I even said anything about the idea of telling him I didn't want to be friends, because I think something in my young heart at the time, even then, knew that it was a callous thing to do, and that he would be heartbroken. But I certainly felt guilty after that reaction. And we were not friends after that. I think I'll always feel bad about that, but... At the same time, I was still learning. I was learning a lot about relationships and what it meant to have a friend, and what I wanted from friends. To a certain degree, I'm still learning that. But at this stage, I feel like I've come up with a lot of good answers. Something I learned then was that boundaries are important. It took me quite a number of years after that to truly realize that boundaries were not only important, but completely acceptable and reasonable to ask of a friend. Because there's a difference, isn't there, between knowing that you need certain boundaries in your life from those close to you, and then also feeling that you're allowed to impose those boundaries. Because sometimes people will make you feel like you can't, or you shouldn't, or you're a bad person for wanting that time or that space. But as I've grown, I've come to learn that there is no right or wrong in a friendship really. You could argue and argue about who did what and why this person was mean or callous or why they didn't respect X, Y or Z. And it can really make you feel like there is a definite right and a definite wrong in these situations of friendship. But ultimately, I think friendship is a contract, if you don't mind me putting it so formally. But it is, in a way. It's an arrangement, an agreement between two people, maybe more. It's an understanding of what you expect from each other. Ultimately, if things are going wrong in a friendship, it's not about who's right or who's wrong. It's about how to rectify, adjust or make clearer your agreement to each other. You may have certain expectations of friends, and those friends may have certain expectations of you. I think as long as you're open and clear about them, you can talk about them. Maybe not as explicitly as writing a contract, but in a way that feels like it furthers the trust and strength you have in your friendship. I think that can only be a healthy thing. I've been really lucky in life, I think, to have a lot of friends. Some of them more transient than others. Some of them stuck around for a long time. I'll always be thankful for my first group of true friends. Looking back, that little cohort really made that certain part of my childhood feel pretty magical. And you'll know if you've lived a life where at any time you've had really close group of friends, or maybe just one friend, you spend a lot of time with in childhood. In my heart, it honestly feels like I was living out some kind of Elam Montgomery novel. You see, when I first started school, I think my friends were a little bit eclectic, and I was a pretty shy kid, so I kind of drifted towards people who would take me in, who were a little more confident, but also who were also a little bit on the outside of things. And for some reason, that meant that I never really stuck with one friend so much for so long. And I wouldn't say it was until I was about nine or ten years old. I think it must have been about ten. That I found my true group of friends. I remember being invited to their house for the first time. And I'd been invited to other children's houses often. But I was particularly excited this time, and nervous to go. And I realized that that was because I actually like them so much, and I wanted to be their friend. And I'm not sure I'd actually experienced that before. And on that first day that I went to their house, I say they were a brother and sister. That first day I went to their house, I remember distinctly, in being the first time that I remember, or that made an impression on me, at least, that I'd said something that had made people laugh. And there was something really special about that. Kind of made me feel social. And so, it was myself and this brother and sister, and a couple of other boys and girls from our class. Think about six of us all together. And we became the closest of friends for a long time. Most of my adolescents, I'd say. perpetual summer. I know it couldn't have been. They must have happened quite spread out over many years, but it almost feels like we were in an infinite school break. We used to ride our bikes, or fell back huge distances back then, go on real trips, and find places to have picnics, riding down big hills, hurting ourselves, as children do. This brother and sister used to have a huge garden, really big, at the bottom of which was an apple orchard. And we used to often camp at the bottom of their garden. It honestly felt more like a forest to be there. I don't think I fully appreciated how lucky I was to be spending time with those people in that place when I was there. But I certainly enjoyed it, and I look back very fondly on those memories. One of that cohort was one of my oldest friends. I say one of my oldest friends. He is most definitely my oldest friend. I'm really lucky to have someone so constant in my life, outside of my family. We were born in the same hospital, and I think I've known him since I was just a little over one years old. And we weren't always the best of friends. But we have been, and I think he'll always be my truest friend, like family. We went to the same school together, same nursery, same secondary school. Shared so much of our lives together. And in a lot of ways, we're quite different. But in particular ways, the ways that matter, we're really similar. I think there's something powerful in just being able to laugh with someone. Sometimes you don't need much else. Doesn't matter how far apart your lives get. If you can bond over things you find funny, then that's a friendship that's gonna last a long time. I also think I'm really lucky to be someone who has found friends later in life as well. Very close friends. I think there's a tendency in life for people to get to a certain age and not really meet too many new people. Perhaps they'll find some work friends. But a number of the people I would now consider to be my closest friends. I met perhaps only ten years ago. I'm really thankful for them, and all my friends, honestly. You know, when I think about the breadth, the broad spectrum of people that I'd consider to be my friend, it's a wonder to me how I even met them, how I kept them in my life. They're also different. And yet, something ties them together that makes them feel like a part of me. And I guess that goes back a little bit to what I was saying earlier about other people being a mirror to yourself. I think you have to write, you have to see a little bit of yourself in someone else. To call them a true friend. Of course, you don't want someone too similar. Oftentimes people become frustrated towards people who are too similar to themselves. Friends bring something novel to you, at the same time as being familiar. I think that's truly what a friend is, if I was to pin it down across the broad spectrum of things that you might consider to be a friend. I would say that friends are kind of like a holiday yourself. You are vacationing to a personality that is just different and exciting enough, but also feels just enough like home. That's what friends can do for each other. Just being in their presence is like sharing the strain of your daily lives. And resting in each other's realities and personalities. And it's a beautiful thing to be able to connect like that. And you know, the thing is, if you really do need to see a little bit of yourself in someone to call them a friend, then really, anybody can be a friend. It's all about the way in which you look at people and how able you are to spend the time to find that common connection. Because ultimately, we're not that different. There is something of ourselves in each and every other person in this world. No one of us is completely unique enough to find no common ground with anyone else. And as I get older, I think that's something I want to see more in myself, not just for myself, but perhaps to be a role model for my young son as he grows up. I'd like to be able to show him that it's not difficult to start a conversation with somebody you don't know. What's that old adage? It's on the tip of my tongue. A stranger is just a friend you haven't met yet. I think that's really true. And it's worth remembering when you feel lonely. I don't know how you feel right now. What kind of situation you are. Whether you are very happily at home, in the place you feel comfortable. These stories of all my past friends are drawing on memories of all the stories you have with your friends. Or whether you're feeling a little bit lonelier, and you're in a place where you don't feel so grounded. And you're in a place where maybe you don't feel like there's as many people around to call a friend. Well, I think it's worth remembering. If you start talking to someone with the intention of wanting to make that common ground, and nothing else, just getting to know someone, well, I think you could make friends with anyone. I found a poem by Robert Frost that I think is really beautiful, and really simply puts across this idea. And shout from where I am, what is it? No, not as there is time to talk. I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground, blade end up and five feet tall, and plod. I go up to the stone wall for a friendly visit.