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One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood. ~Seneca

How important is the shared experience to a friendship? Of course, most, if not all, friendships are formed out of something shared, be it school, work, another friend, or a common place or event. But is the continuance of shared experiences what sustains them?

The majority of my college friends were in science or engineering fields. (Most of my closest were also yellow and brown women, another example of shared experience.) Did we gravitate towards each other because we had common ground or was that just a happy, "oh, you too?" after we were already friends? (Granted, a lot of common ground was also established via high school when it came to many of my college friends...) One could say that I didn't have opportunities to meet others outside of those fields, given my coursework, but I also lived in the HoCo for three years, was an RA for a semester in a non-science SLO, and had jobs and clubs with diverse folks. I had plenty of opportunity, but perhaps not plenty of common ground.

There are exceptions to any rule, namely those high school friends I seem to mention all the time lately, who studied things as varied as education and graphic design and film, and we probably took no common coursework, were (for the most part) not even in the same state for college, and still maintain strong ties to this day. Okay, yes, a few studied science or engineering, too.

Other exceptions include most of the people I met through TFA, as there were few math-science types. Our common ground, even more than mindsets and common goals, was our kids. We just wouldn't shut up about them. There's almost insta-friendship when you bond over children and a job you have a love-hate relationship with.

I write about this topic because I see all my new law school classmates, and I wonder what this next narrative will be for me. The majority of my law school friends - for now - will probably be in my section, since we're sharing the experience of having the same professors. I say for now because next year, when we choose our own coursework (and I diverge slightly to the education school), who knows who I'll share experiences with then?

One of my closest friends is finishing up his last year of law school as I'm starting my first, and I feel like my picking his brain about life in law school and the job hunt and what to do and what not to do is making us even closer. The triumphs and joys of life are better shared (also the failures...). I had lunch the other day with another friend from high school who is a 2L here in Philadelphia, and there, too, was a common thread that had not existed before.

I have met several TFA alums here - at last count, six in my year alone - and that again makes for relatively easy conversation. After the standard "Where are you from? Where did you go to school? Are you coming straight from undergrad?" questions are out of the way, there's still more to get to know: "What did you teach? Where did you teach? Public or charter? How long?"

They're the ones who might best understand why administrative frustrations made me want to go to law school all the more. They're the ones who know why taking three or four classes a day four days a week isn't really as stressful as teaching six every day of the week. (I find myself barely knowing what to do with hour-long breaks between classes!) They're the ones who know what it's like to miss the classroom, what it's like to miss the children. (So much that when some of them called me from the pool for a hot second the other day, I almost cried.) They're the ones who get implicitly why I left the classroom. Because they know: if we didn't do this now, we might never have left and made it to law school, and we would have regretted it. I didn't want to have regrets about my hopes and dreams, and I wouldn't want to be teaching my students to have them either.

The first week of law school has gone by, and it was nothing to write home about. I've met many people who could become good friends, and there are many more yet to meet. Time to make these three years count.