“The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings. It is an intelligence above language.” –Henry David Thoreau
Friendship is something that runs deep in our culture; no matter how digitized we get nothing will ever replace the importance of walking through life with others. The company of friends gives our lives meaning and contour. Our friends sharpen us and remind us to be our true selves. They call forth a sense of rest from far within us that breathes comfort to those around us, even when they’re just standing by our sides. Likewise, friends welcome us into the space of their own lives; they invite us into the things that they love and say “come, take a long deep sip, and then tell me what you think.” Over time, I have learned that being a good friend and having a good friend are some of life’s greatest riches.
The interactions that occur between good friends are realizations of our inmost longings-desires to know and be known, and to belong. Knowing others well, we learn to love them well, and we begin to see them through a lens that recognizes and affirms all that is beautiful and good in them. Likewise, over time we see our friends’ flaws clearly, but we choose not to live in the space of these flaws. Instead, we gently encourage our friends to overcome the obstacles that hinder their ability to fully embrace the people that they were made to truly be. Likewise, our friends do the same for us, deepening and heightening our experience and calling forth the best in us.
This particular reflection is an ode to friendship–friendship done at a distance, and friendship done face to face. There is nothing I treasure more than the cultivation of a friendship that lasts for a long, long time. And although you often cannot know this at the beginning, these relationships bring such a richness to life’s experiences as they develop over the years. Friendships create meaning in our lives, and they likewise enable us to create pockets of meaning within those of others. As Henry David Thoreau once suggested, friendship involves “an intelligence above language,” it involves an attentiveness that extends far beyond shared words, and a type of knowing that transcends physicality.
Thoreau’s musings come from a book passed onto me by my mother many years ago. It was a gift from one of her college best friends, entitled “A Book of Friendship: Celebrating the Joys of Having Friends.” This mustard yellow book, filled with poems and illustrations, has weathered with me for nearly twenty years. Young and sprightly when I first received this now treasured gem, I hardly appreciated what it had to say. Yet, today I reflect back upon it often and smile gently at how closely many of its passages resonate with my experience.
Good friends, those who truly last the tests of time, are often hard to come by. People move, relationships change, circumstances shift. And life goes on. As someone who grew up moving rather frequently, I learned this lesson fairly quickly. It is one thing to develop a friendship with a neighbor or classmate and to spend time enjoying one another’s company in the same place, but it is really quite another to try to maintain that relationship at a distance while continuing on with life’s everyday activities. Yet, the challenges of modern life often demand that people break physical ties, and at what expense? While today’s technologies enable us to connect with others at great distance, is there a limit? And further, how can we maintain friendships across state and national lines when there is really no other option?
My friend Sarah, who has been there through bitter relationships, through passion pursuits, and through fuzzy life transitions is a testament to the fact that good friendships are worth cultivating–whether maintained from down the street or done at a distance. Sarah and I first met in college, through a mutual friend who encouraged us to live together. Our friendship started out slow at first, like any other. Early on, we both enjoyed one another’s company and wanted to spend time together. We often grabbed breakfast or coffee on campus as a means to hear about one another’s lives and share what we were learning. Slowly over the years, what started out as a surface-level acquaintance grew into something much more, where we are now able to speak into the hard places of one another’s lives and likewise able to just sit together silent enjoying moments of reflection. Both of us would say that this depth of friendship didn’t come without considerable time or effort, or even sometimes sacrifice.
What has made my friendship with Sarah thrive, and will help it continue to do so, is a mutual commitment to its sustenance. Since college, Sarah and I have rarely lived in the same place, although we did have one choice year together in the DC suburbs. Our friendship has existed mostly over the course of phone calls and a few in-person visits multiple times per year, sometimes involving coast-to-coast plane trips. Ironically, although neither of us would like for distance to separate us, I think we would both say that the hours between us in recent years have helped to make our friendship stronger. The distance between us has forced us to commit to making time for one another and, without the convenience of living together or even nearby, it has been imperative for us to carve out space to know and to care for one another as friends.
As my own relationship with my now dear friend illustrates, a true and lasting friendship involves a sort of mutual consent–a consent to dive deep and allow for mistakes, a consent to be there even when it is tough or inconvenient, a consent to listen even when we do not want to hear the truth. Like Thoreau suggested, a friendship is composed not primarily of words, but of meanings, meanings wrought over time and through shared experience. It is possible to create such meaning over phone calls and emails, but the true snuff of a friendship is tested and refined through shared experiences–late night concerts, day trips to the countryside, and sometimes tears over a glass of wine. As Thoreau says further in the longer passage from which the one I’ve quoted draws:
The Friend is a necessarius, and meets his Friend on homely ground; not on carpets and cushions, but on the ground and on rocks they will sit, obeying the natural and primitive laws. They will meet without any outcry, and part without loud sorrow. Their relation implies such qualities as the warrior prizes; for it takes a valor to open the hearts of men as well as the gates of castles. It is not an idle sympathy and mutual consolation merely, but a heroic sympathy of aspiration and endeavor.
Difficult to put into words, but full of import nonetheless, friendship involves a living and loving that can only come through time, effort, and great care. It is something to cherish, to esteem, and to aspire to as one of life’s greatest endeavors.