The Parachute

In the gray mid-winter of January 2021, I wasn't looking for a life raft—I was just looking for dinner companions. I was highly focused on making new connections and depending a few key friendships after the pandemic had reshaped my social landscape. I wasn’t thinking about my life five years down the road or the parachute that would save me. We were fresh out of the lockdown, and frankly, I just wanted a group of women to go to hang out with regularly and share a charcuterie board without worrying about contracting a lethal virus.

Fast forward to 2025: in the midst of an intense season of professional growth, that exact parachute opened. While I felt like I was working around the clock, the truth was I was still clinging to the core anchors of my life. Family bonding, exercise, and time with friends were happening—just in much smaller, less consistent doses. It is ironic how “the anchors” we strive so hard to set in place suddenly feel movable when work takes over—particularly social relationships. This story, however, is about how I didn’t lose touch with my social life. But I easily could have. There is plenty of research showing that when modern life gets overwhelming, friendships are among the first things to be cut. Even more concerning, the research shows that in day-to-day life, social connection ranks quite low on the list of priorities. Given these facts, it is remarkable that I didn’t put my friendships on the back burner while I was so focused on my professional aspirations.

As much as I would like to think that I could have maintained regularity and closeness with my friends while my workload more than doubled, the truth is, I don’t know how I would have done it well. I think I would have kicked the can week after week, telling myself, I’ll call Renee next week or look at my calendar and make a plan with Christy soon. It was an exciting but also hectic time, and I think I would have dropped the ball on keeping up with everyone. This is where the parachute comes in.

I didn’t have to work very hard that year to stay in touch with my friends—and I can’t take the credit for that. Here is why. I am part of a group of eight women who have met every month since that fateful January in 2021, when I invited them to join me and commit to monthly get-togethers. Only now, we connect much more often, with daily banter on a group text, impromptu meet-ups, birthday celebrations, and weekend getaways. Together, we make a self-sustaining web of connection that doesn’t falter, even when one of us is having a tough time. 

Last year, in a passage from my journal, I wrote that the group's dynamic and shared responsibility were a saving grace. There were many months when a gathering was planned by someone else—I just showed up, often empty-handed and bedraggled. I put in little effort but reaped all the rewards. This felt incredibly relieving and nourishing. There were times when I shared teary-eyed appreciation for being held by these women, even though I knew I didn’t have the energy to hold them in return. One of them gently reminded me that just a few months before, when she was barely getting by, I had been putting a huge amount of effort into the group. Being part of a circle like this means that if each person shares equally in the overall commitment, everyone doesn’t have to contribute at 100% every day to sustain the group. This is the gift of mutuality. Unlike reciprocity—which demands an equal, one-to-one exchange—mutuality allows us to give whatever we have in a given moment. The group is sustained by the sum of its parts, not by equal accounting from each individual. Sometimes that means the individual offers 100%, sometimes only 30%. But overall, everyone shares a basic, foundational commitment to give in whatever capacity they have at any given moment.

By sharing responsibility for planning and organizing gatherings, we have met regularly despite whatever was going on in our individual lives. In the past five years, there have been marriage separations, children in serious physical or mental distress, broken bones and surgeries, emergencies with aging parents, death of parents, basements flooding, and yes, the launch of a new business concept. You name it, and one of us has been through it. And despite these disruptive, consuming events, we have still met at least once a month for five years. 

The image that often comes to mind when I think of my friendship group is a bunch of elementary school kids in a circle playing Parachute Popcorn. Maybe you remember this game from fifth-grade gym class: each kid holds up a section of a colorful play parachute. Then the teacher throws a ball in the middle, and when it bounces on the tight material, it flings here and there, each person lifting their part of the parachute to keep it from bouncing off and hitting the ground. The magic of many people holding up their edge of the parachute is that if one person is tired or absent, those who remain can still keep the ball moving. In my adult friendship group, even when one or two of us couldn’t organize or gather, enough of us remained to keep the friendships propelling forward—our ball of connection never bounced to the ground.

I once heard this definition of community: it continues even if you are not there. Think of how a church congregation works—even if you don’t attend on a Sunday, there are still plenty of people who do in your absence. In this way, a group of friends, all honoring the same monthly commitment to gather, helps keep the community going. Our group is sustained because most of us show up most of the time. It is only a handful of times a year that all eight of us are together, but each month, some assortment of us attend, often a group of five to six. Doesn’t this formula for friendship feel accessible? This means even in difficult seasons when you can’t put in your full effort and energy—when you have to let go of your edge of the parachute—the friendships will survive.  

This concept of building friendships that can weather difficult times is something I am intently invested in. Most research on what challenges modern friendship points to a shift away from social groups toward more one-on-one relationships. The obstacles arise because one-on-one friendships place a greater burden on each individual's effort to maintain the connection. If one friend is going through a challenging time, it can strain the relationship dynamic, because there is only one friend to hold the parachute.

It is incredibly ironic that at the very moment I was building a program for female friendship and eyeball-deep in research on social connections, the friend group I had created in my personal life was keeping me afloat. The more research I read about why we are in a loneliness epidemic and a social health crisis, the more I understood, from a purely scientific perspective, why and how my group was keeping me afloat. I intuitively knew why it was working from the way it felt and enhanced my life, but reading about the science solidified that planning ahead, making a commitment to ourselves and others to put friendship first, can be life-altering.

In the fractured and buzzing cadence of modern life, making plans in advance and committing to follow through is the simplest way to keep friendship alive, even when other parts of your life are hard. On nights when I was exhausted and saw a gathering penciled in on my calendar, I showed up.

I showed up depleted and left feeling filled back up.

Even though my girlfriends and I aren’t in elementary school anymore, we are standing on the playground of adult life, shoulder to shoulder, each holding our edge of the parachute, laughing, crying, and trusting that together we can keep the ball bouncing.

Enjoy the slow- Heather