I made a promise to myself back in February to take a step away from pervasive negativity in my life. Instead I chose to work on recognizing positive forces in my life and spend my time trying to become more positive in general. I can’t say this has been the most successful endeavor–there are times when it’s really easy to become wrapped up in little issues or become bogged down by long work days and too little sleep. Over all I’ve noticed that the small steps I’ve taken have allowed me to recognize the ‘good’ around me instead of dwelling on the bad.

One method that has been instrumental to this positivity has been reconnecting with some old friends. I went to a small school growing up and many of my friends I’ve known for 20+ years. I’ve known my friend Matt that grew up right down the road from me since preschool, my friend Kyleen and I met the summer before second grade at camp, and I walked my best friend Kat to the nurses office in fourth grade when she chipped her tooth on the black top during gym (we’d already been best friends for two years at this point). These friendships have defined me more than I recognized while growing up and being 300+ miles away from most of these friends has been hard.

A couple of weeks back my friend Jamie was visiting Kyleen in Boston and they were both talking about accomplishments that they had been working toward but had not found the motivation to complete. They reached out to Matt knowing that he was in a similar boat and they had an idea. They reached out to a group of our friends from high school asking if we’d like to work together to hold one another accountable to different goals that we’d been working to achieve.

Bear in mind, I’m the country bumpkin of the group right now. I have three friends in law school, one finishing up his engineering degree by building a pneumatic braille type writer, a friend that is trying to build her own app, one that’s been working at a biodynamic vineyard, one working for a non-profit in New York City, and another that’s just graduated with a degree in Engineering Science. Regardless of where we are in life we’ve all been taking turns daily to update everyone about what’s going on in our lives, our struggles, our goals, and things that we’d like to accomplish by that day next week.

Every day I have an email or two from an old friend updating me on their life–not just the “we’re catching up after months or years of not seeing each other”, but the nitty gritty of week to week life. What they’ve been struggling with whether it’s eating healthier, finishing a particularly hard book, or writing that email that you’ve been dreading has been a reminder that even though we’re all far away and following our own paths we’re still struggling with a lot of the same things that tend to stem from procrastination.

My favorite part of all of this has been watching a lot of us tackle these challenges, because I know if it hadn’t been for these emails I wouldn’t have made the progress on my first ever sweater that I’ve been making. Thanks to reconnecting with these friends I’ve shaped, seamed, and knit arms on this sweater! I’ll be finishing up the neck tonight, weaving in the ends tomorrow, and hopefully shipping it out by Thursday!