Morning Coffee Moments

Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash‍ ‍

I woke up early this morning so I could have a little time awake before heading out to run a 5K. I was still in my bathrobe, sipping black coffee, with the floor-to-ceiling windows behind me overlooking the Raquette River.

I love this view from our vacation home. I love the water, the boat, the change of pace, and the quiet that comes from being away from my normal routine. But after chatting with my friend for about 30 minutes, I realized that my favorite part about being up here is not actually the scenery or the time off work. It's moments like this.

The morning coffee moments.

As we get older, friendship gets more complicated: people move away, have kids and careers become more demanding. Family responsibilities shift and calendars fill up in ways that make even a simple dinner feel like it requires a project manager. Even with the friends we see regularly, so much of our time together can become centered on catching up on the big things: work, family, health, schedules, trips, milestones, problems.

All of that matters, of course. But there is a particular kind of closeness that does not always happen in the scheduled catch-up. It happens in the pauses around it.

When I was growing up, the aunt and uncle I was closest with weren’t actually my aunt and uncle at all.  It was my mom's childhood friend and her husband and we probably saw them as often as my blood relatives but the few days of the year when we did see them, they always stayed at our house. The difference then was not in the quantity of time spent together, but the quality; it was the late-night chats and the impromptu conversations that brought us closer together.

Research supports how much these friendships matter, especially as we get older. A 2023 longitudinal study of nearly 13,000 U.S. adults over age 50 found that stronger friendships were associated with better psychosocial outcomes, including higher positive affect and lower risk of depression.

The key word there is stronger. Not more frequent, not more convenient, not even necessarily lifelong, but stronger. The kind of friendship that grows when there is enough time and space for conversations to move past the updates and into the real stuff.

This morning was a reminder that those small morning coffee moments are not really small at all.