Having different kinds of friends — so very interesting.
I have a bounce-off-of friend. I bounce stuff off him to see what it looks like coming back toward me with his spin on it. It’s helpful, the curve my ideas take on the rebound. Yesterday we spent an hour on the phone debating the growth curve of organizations. Fascinating.
I have a never-let-go friend. She is my stick-tight friend. We have waded through years and yards of stuff, and she is still there. I love the safety of such a friend. This week we reflect on a relational train wreck we both witnessed and survived. I totally adore, her loyalty — to me.
I have a calls-when-he needs-help friend. I don’t mind. I like being the go-to-guy for him. I like how he trust that what I say, or that what I don’t say, is good. It’s good for me to be there for him, in the sacred moment, when the masks come off. This week he told me that when he drove away from the house, after the fight, it was as if he was moving through a dream. “I couldn’t believe that I was doing,” he told me, “what I could see myself doing, leaving, like that.” It was good, to deconstruct the dream, that was really — reality.
I have a conceptual friend. When we meet, ideas meet. We talk insights, theories, axioms, intellectual constructs. We discourse on aesthetics, theology, history, sociality. Recently we explored the kind of creativity that can arise out of devastation. Our friendship exists within the universe of our ideations. I love an abstraction, that we invent and then that we event. It becomes other people’s reality. Fine, so very fine!
The other day I thought about a friend who is not longer a friend. We went through something hard and this friend didn’t understand what was to be understood within the thin and quickly ripping fabric of possible understanding and so we went on down the road with the clothing that had previously covered us, ripped completely off, and I found myself traveling alone. It happens. I recovered myself with the warm embrace of new friends.
It’s very interesting, the variation of sociality.
It is very interesting, the morph, the seed, the stalk, the bloom, and the sometimes surprisingly quick wilt of togetherness, the amazing sustainability of real love.
What to do?
Enjoy, the sweet ones you have been given.
Grieve, the once dear ones, occasionally lost.
Look forward to the precious ones still to come.
Thrive! 