The Art of Showing Up

There is a particular kind of Canadian magic that happens the moment the patio furniture comes out of storage. Suddenly, everyone is available. Suddenly, “let’s catch up soon” stops being a polite fiction and becomes an actual plan with a date attached to it.

I noticed this shift a few summers ago, standing in my backyard with a glass of iced tea sweating onto my hand, watching two friends I hadn’t seen properly since Christmas laugh at something my husband said. It struck me how easily we let friendships go dormant in the colder months — not out of any lack of love, but out of sheer survival. Winter in this country asks a great deal of us. We hunker down. We conserve. And somewhere in all that conserving, our friendships quietly go to sleep too.

Summer wakes them back up, if we let it.

But here is the part I want to gently press on, the part that separates a lovely season from a truly meaningful one: reconnection is not something that happens to you. It is something you do. It is a decision, made in a slightly inconvenient moment, to text the friend you’ve been meaning to text. To actually pick up the phone instead of sending the sixth “we should get together” message into the void. Elegance, in the truest sense, has never been about being unbothered — it is about being intentional even when it costs you something. And a little bit of vulnerability, the kind required to say “I miss you, let’s fix a date,” is a small cost worth paying.

This summer, I challenged myself to a simple practice, and I’d love for you to try it too: once a week, reach out to one friend I have been neglecting. Not a group chat message. A direct, warm, specific invitation. “Come sit on my porch Thursday evening, I’ll have the wine chilled.” It takes less than two minutes to send. It has, without exaggeration, brought back three friendships I thought had simply run their course.

There’s a graciousness to being the one who initiates. It says, without needing to say it aloud, you matter enough for me to risk the awkwardness of reaching first. And in a world that rewards being endlessly busy, choosing to be the friend who shows up is its own quiet act of femininity and strength — soft in tone, firm in follow-through.

So before the summer slips by in a blur of errands and long evenings that somehow still get away from us, I want to leave you with this: pick one person. Send the text today, not tomorrow. Let this be the season your friendships stop being something you mean to tend to, and start being something you actually do.

A gentle prompt for your journal this week: Who have I been meaning to reconnect with? What is one small, specific step I can take today?

This is a four-part series on deepening friendships and strengthening bonds this summer.