A 3-Part Recipe for Core Memories With Friends

The Ravioli Recipe

In college, my freshman (and sophomore and senior) year roommate shared a New Yorker article with me called Bumping into Mr. Ravioli. Looking back on it now, it described an incredibly premature worry for us as 17-year-olds who lived less than five minutes from the majority of other students on campus. 

In the article, the author discovers that his daughter has an imaginary friend named Mr. Ravioli, who she never actually spends any time with. Their schedules never quite line up. Things interfere at the last minute: appointments, work, you know how it is! The author realizes that Mr. Ravioli was born from his daughter constantly overhearing her parents flake and be flaked on for coffee, brunch, or dinner in New York City. “Well hopefully I bump into him!” she resigns.

While the author makes peace with this generational inheritance of rare overlaps with friends, and many missed catch-ups, I recall my roommate vehemently telling me we must avoid that outcome at all costs. We should never find our relationship being one where we’re just missing each other for coffee.

Fast forward a little over ten years, the realities of late-twenties life are settling in. The overwhelming observation I’ve come to terms with is that we cannot have it all at once, and we cannot expect that we’re in perpetual lifestyle and geographic alignment with each and every loved one in our lives. Some friends will be in graduate school, others will be having kids, others will move to a new country, some might be down on their luck, others on a manic pixie dream, and many will be constantly on the move for work. There are definitely lucky folks who find their childhood best friends still living next door, but many of us have relative strangers for neighbors (who we should definitely also befriend!).

A recent reality for me is that I’ve just left San Francisco, and I miss the close friends that I left behind. We find time for phone calls where we catch up on life, and that’s nice, but Mr. Ravioli comes to mind. I don’t want these relationships to idle or wither; I want to keep growing and keep creating meaningful moments together.

So I planned a trip. And this trip reminded me that with people we care about who are far away, there’s a simple recipe to follow that can gift the whole group a core memory, one that can fuel and continue to build friendships in a modern humanity where close ones are distant. Here it is.

Ingredient One: The Gift of Time

The first, and entirely most important ingredient is dedicated time. However much time you can get with one or two or three friends together, but ideally a few days. Time is a gift, and in the corniest and truest way, sharing that time together is an upfront present that everyone can unwrap.

My friends and I were each able to take a Friday and a Monday off, and meet up in San Francisco to drive out and backcountry ski in the Eastern Sierras to spend the weekend in the mountains. There was a lot to look forward to. But in a way, the trip felt already made just knowing that for four days our time was each other’s. The memories were guaranteed.

Ingredient Two: Adventure

The second ingredient is adventure. Our group talked about getting a guide for one of our days in the mountains. It would make the planning a whole lot easier, we’d be guaranteed great snow, and we could just spend our time enjoying the company and perfect ski lines. We decided against it, though, on the basis of an argument made by one of my friends. He summed it up well, saying, “I feel like backcountry skiing here is a bit of a shrouded map, and part of the fun is going off into the unknown with our friends and coming out having learned more about it together. If a guide takes us there, I think that part of the map will still be in a shadow. We’ll have a good time, but I think we’ll be missing something.” We all agreed with his Legend of Zelda-type analogy, and continued to do the up-front work preparing and researching potential hikes and descents for the area.

The prolific musician interviewer Nardwuar has a poignant TED Talk, called Do it Yourself. Outsourcing the work has its time and place, and waiting for it to arrive at your doorstep may one day bear fruit, but to really adventure and make these core memories with your friends, put as much as you can in your own hands and efforts (assuming you do have the technical know-how to keep yourself safe.)

Ironically, despite our preparation, by the time we arrived at our destination and spoke to some local gear shops about our plans A, B, and C, we were informed that none of those would be possible. They nudged us towards a few other areas, but our prior preparation kept us agile and feeling confident we would be good with any plan.

Ingredient Three: Recording

The third and final ingredient for making a core memory is keeping a record. This might sound paradoxical. It would be in line with the rest of this post that a key ingredient for all of this is staying present and not recording every moment. That being said, if you follow the first two ingredients of the recipe, I can guarantee that you will be present and having a fantastic time. Future you, then, will be incredibly happy to look back on some photos and stories to reminisce or remind themselves of the impact of those moments. Our memories are immensely malleable, ensuring that we take care of how we relate to these special moments is worth the effort.

iPhone photos are okay. But they tend to be oversaturated, blemishless, and absent of actual character. Buy a disposable or bring a point-and-shoot film camera. Film captures emotions and space the way that you remember. Keep a group journal, document the jokes and reactions and emotions. Write a blog post about your adventure. Ultimately any effort to record the trip packages up that time that you gifted your friends, and that they gifted you, in a happy album of memories.

Friendship, Yum

Not every week of life can look like this, and much of our friendships as we get older will be spent in those coffee catch-ups and monthly calls. But embedded in this recipe for a core memory with friends is a philosophy of life: be alive, together, as much as we can be. Something about a lifetime of catching up (if we can find the time!)  just sounds like we’ve lost the plot a bit. Or that the real story of that friendship has ended, or has shifted into a filler chapter, where not much happens. The purpose of this recipe is to remind us that the story of that chapter is more in our hands than we think. 

The more time we can dedicate to sharing with close friends, experiencing adventure together, and recording our memories, the less we’ll hope to just bump into Mr. Ravioli. Instead we’ll feel he’s always present, no matter the actual distance. 

Hungry For More Adventure-Inspiring Reads?

• Why I Love to Travel, Beyond the Obvious Reasons: It’s all about living a better story.
• Don’t Minimize Regrets. Maximize Your Anti-Regrets: Focus on proactively engineering ‘anti-regrets’ for a life packed with moments your future self will thank you for.
• How to Savor Nostalgia Now, Not Later: Practice ‘prostalgia’ to savor today’s experiences with the richness your future self will treasure.
• How to Fight FOMO and Enjoy “NoMO FOMO”: ‘NoMO FOMO’ = Not Missing Out, Focus on Meaningful Objectives.
• Dare to Do Something Daunting: Big, slightly scary adventures are where the most unforgettable memories and growth are forged.