Reaching Back: What Happened When Ricki Radosh Found the Friends She Thought She'd Lost

There is almost certainly a person from your past you have been meaning to reach. An old friend, a mentor, someone who mattered a great deal at a particular time in your life. You think of them every so often, you tell yourself you will call, and somehow the years slip by. This is a story about what happens when you finally do.

In Part 1 of this mini-series, my guest Ricki Radosh, a writer, happiness coach, and host of the Claim Your Happiness podcast, showed us how the story we tell ourselves about friendship can be flat wrong. In Part 2, she takes on a specific and tender version of making friends in midlife: reaching back to the people you have lost touch with.

The list she made in 2020

When the world shut down in 2020, people from Ricki's past began surfacing in her mind. Not one or two, but a whole cast of them. She reminded me of a time before Facebook and cell phones, when leaving a place often meant losing the people in it, because all you carried away was a phone number.

"All we had when we left a situation was, for me at that time, my parents' phone number," she said. "I left my parents' house, that's all I had."

So in the middle of lockdown, she did something concrete. She made a list of about thirty people she wanted to find, did a little research, and started reaching out.

The goal that sat for years

Ricki has a practice she has kept since 2002. Every January she sits down and writes what she wants to have happen that year, broken into areas: health, friends, relationships, community. Reconnecting with these people went on the list. And then it stayed there.

2020, 2021, 2022. She kept pulling the same goal forward without really acting on it, sending the occasional email or text once or twice a year. If you have ever carried the same resolution from one January to the next, you know exactly how that feels.

"All you have to do is put a date out there"

The turn came from a single sentence. Ricki had written to a man she deeply respected, the leader of a course she took back in 1997, to say he was still on her radar and she wanted to come see him. He wrote back: all you have to do is put a date out there.

That is the whole thing. Naming the one small, concrete action is exactly what her Name It, Frame It, Claim It method calls the claim it part. Finding the date was not simple, her life is full, but the action was suddenly clear. As she put it, "All I have to do is pick a date."

Letting someone else carry it

There is a second, quieter lesson here for anyone who is always the organizer. Ricki was tired of being the one who makes every arrangement and every call. So this time she reached out to a college friend, offered her house for a gathering, and then deliberately put the ball in the friend's court.

Nothing happened. For weeks, nothing. And then a group text arrived: Ricki so generously offered her house, I dropped the ball, when do you want to get together? Within forty-eight hours they had a weekend on the calendar for October. She did not have to carry it alone.

The reunion, and the plaque

When Ricki finally visited the mentor she had not seen since 1997, it felt like no time had passed. On his wall hung a plaque with her picture, his, and everyone from that course. She asked who had made it for him.

He said, "Ricki, you did."

She had no memory of it. But there was the evidence, again, that she had been woven into people's lives far more than her own story ever told her.

A dream, not a burden

The reframe that stayed with Ricki, and with me, came at the very end. She had assumed that finally going to see him would feel like lifting a weight, the heaviness of a thing you keep meaning to do. But that is not what it was.

A weight is pressure, the call you dread and put off for weeks. This was different. She had put a dream out into the world in 2020, and she made it real. A dream, not a burden. Once she saw that, she could look at her other long-postponed hopes in a completely different light.

Your question for the week

So here is your question for the week. Who is the person you have been meaning to reach? And what if reconnecting with them is not one more thing on your list, but a dream you get to make come true? Maybe this is the week you put a date out there.

If you missed it, Part 1 of this series is here. Next up, Part 3, on building a whole new circle from scratch when you land somewhere new.

Listen to the Full Episode

Episode 36: Reaching Back: Reconnecting With Old Friends in Midlife with Ricki Radosh (Part 2 of 4)

🎧 Podcast Page 
🍎 Apple Podcasts 
🟢 Spotify 
🎵 Amazon Music 
▶️ Watch on YouTube

Connect with Ricki Radosh

Ricki's website Claim Your Happiness podcast (YouTube) 
Substack 
Instagram @ricki_radosh 
The Grass Grows Where I Am (anthology)

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About Dvora Citron

Dvora Citron is a Registered Nurse, National Board Certified Health & Wellness Coach, Lifestyle Medicine Practitioner, and the founder of slant2plants®. She hosts Sexy in Your 60s to bring women the real ingredients of vibrant aging through science, story, support, and soul. Her work helps women 50 and older create the health, confidence, and longevity they want in ways that feel realistic and sustainable.

slant2plants.com 🦋 Blog 🦋 Instagram @slant2plants 🦋 Facebook 🦋 LinkedIn 🦋 Pinterest

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