3 Life Lessons from the Friends Finale

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This month, Friends reached the 10^th anniversary of its finale. This show is endlessly hilarious (I always end up laughing out loud when I watch it--can't help it) and priceless to millions of fans.

After watching the six head out the door for one last time the other night, and that camera pan across the empty apartment (probably close to the tenth time now for me), a few things have hit me that I'd like to share:

-ONE-

The first episode began with a couple of the characters’ lives in chaos, among them being Rachel, who was starting completely over with no idea how to make it in the world without Daddy's money. I know it’s funny to watch, but Rachel the character was majorly confused and probably pretty terrified. And even once she got a job at Central Perk, she realized she had no plan and her life was going nowhere.

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Yet we see with the vision of retrospect that this trainwreck of a start would bring her all the way to a dream job offer in Paris (surpassing even previous dream job offers) ten years later. She was already beginning the best days of her life, even if those days seemed far away at best. (More on that in #3.) And when she moved in with Monica and didn't even know how to run a washing machine, she unknowingly was beginning the best thing that ever happened to her.

 -TWO-

I can’t imagine what it was like watching this show develop as it was airing, not knowing what the writers would decide to do with these characters next. I saw the finale in passing when it originally aired, so I’ve always just known how it ends without being super involved when it happened (or old enough to understand any of it). But I know everyone was pulling for Ross and Rachel to finally end up together, one way or another.

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I recently read an interview with the writers where they said they knew they had to bring the couple together once and for all, but they wanted to do it differently than anyone would expect. And by doing that, they made it a lot more true to life. (Relatively speaking—I don’t know how true to life Phoebe’s escapades were that night…). But Ross and Rachel got to where they were meant to be. Not how either of them--or we--planned or ever expected. But they did.

-THREE-

The whole series spanned ten years: the uncertain time in young people’s lives when they’ve just entered the real world and are finding their way through life. The years that ensue, while they’re being lived, all rush by in the quest for certain goals: a well-paying job, a fulfilling career, a real relationship that lasts and trumps all their past relationships. They live those years—years that while being lived are so now, so present—that they don’t realize how soon they’ll become the beautiful memories of the future.

We ride the ten years with them (and if you watched it when it originally aired, actually for the span of that long) and live the joys, the tears, and the laughter as they do. Then in the final few episodes we get to realize this along with them: that the ever so now present that seems to trudge along in the blur of life is the gold of tomorrow.

When the door closes, the six dear lives head off for one more coffee together, and we take one last view of the—yes, Joey—purple apartment, we realize something along with them: love where you are, because the memories of today, the beautiful moments scattered between the sad ones and the dark ones, will outshine them with time and become the essence of the future’s precious memories.

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In the ten years we can feel free to imagine followed, we know Monica and Chandler entered the world of parenthood and became better and better parents as Erica and Jack grew and grew, Phoebe and Mike started raising their own little Von Trapp children minus the Nazis, Joey went off and hopefully finally found love, and Ross and Rachel embarked on the journey that was fifteen years in the making. Those ensuing ten years now accomplished this May were ten more years of uncertainties that also held their own answers and added to the beautiful memories of the decade before.

Change is life’s inevitable partner, and by the time ten more years have passed, it’s unavoidable that something will be different, more likely many somethings. But life doesn’t start in the hazy, somehow perfected future. Life is now, and just as much today as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. Treasure it, amid the uncertainties, discoveries, questions, answers, heartaches, accomplishments, trials, and laughter.

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So thank you, Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Ross, Chandler, and Joey for letting us take this ride with you and gain in a few minutes the lessons you all earned in ten years.

P.S. Linking up with Funday Monday, Manic Monday here and here, The Hump Day Blog Hop, Let Your Light Shine, Thinking Out Loud, Treat Yo' Self Thursday, Be.You.Tiful Link Party, Lovely Thursdays, and Link Love