Time, the Great Iron

Time has a way of working out the wrinkles out of life. T had a big wrinkle on Friday - his friends decided not to be his friends anymore. He was, of course, devastated. Life was over. There was just no use going on, because as anyone who has been eleven plainly knows - your friends are everything. On the whole, T has been well accepted by the kids at the "new" school. He is amiable and wants to fit in. He is a little prone to following due to that fact. The friends he's made definitely possess more dominant personalities, and he doesn't mind. They are smart and well liked. He's an easy addition to the crowd because he doesn't rock the boat much. Until Friday. He declared that the game they were all playing together was unfairly weighted for one team, he was sick of it and didn't want to play anymore. Imagine his shock when the rest of the boys gathered in a group and discussed "him" - standing just close enough for him to hear his name being thrown around. One of the boys came over to him afterward and apologized. He didn't like what had just happened, and wasn't going to hang with the group's decision to vote T "out". On Friday, as far as he knew, he had one friend left. I'm not ashamed to say that of all the boys, that singular friend was the one I had been most impressed with all along. Character is more evident at 11 and 12 than one might think. I wasn't especially surprised to learn that it had been this boy who remained a friend in the face of the cruelty of the others. I was astounded that the others would be so fickle and unkind.
Monday after school, he was fine. All of the boys had returned to him and apologized for being mean. They did want to be friends after all. I asked T if he was sure it was what he wanted, and he seemed confident that everything was going to be fine. In my mind, however, this was a shot over the bow of my baby boy's ship. I wonder if it isn't a harbinger of other difficult things to come in the future. There was another lesson, however that seems even more powerful. Time often takes care of things that seem much to large for us to work out on our own. Sometimes, it flattens us, along with the wrinkles. Time proves us, right or wrong. Most often, it proves our worrying of no use. It lessens pain and smoothes even the grandest of mountains.
For me, there are quite a number of mountains on the horizon. I'm learning to take one day's journey at a time, and not to try to climb the mountains that are still in the distance. The time it will take to reach them is time to prepare, and that alone can make a difficult climb much easier.