Friendship

Today, I had a long conversation about friendship with a few old friends: Anne Lamott, David Whyte, Aristotle, and Emerson.  C.S. Lewis dropped in, then Maurice Sendak and John O'Donahue and Rilke.

Only one of these people I've ever met in person (David Whyte), and several were dead before I was born, but thanks to the blog "Brainpickings," and its creator,  the brilliant Maria Popova, I spent the morning in bed with them all.

(I've already done what she cautions against in defining friendship--I've claimed as friends admired writers who don't even know me!)

What is friendship?  We use the word too liberally, Popova suggests.

Here's a brief summary of her onion of people and which ones are which:

Acquaintances are people we know--out of the thousands of people we've met briefly or seen in the same places.  We like them well enough, but we don't call them friends.  

The next circle in the onion of people are the ones we know and like.  Maybe they work in the same office or share a couple of hobbies, but our conversations are usually superficial.

Then there are kindred spirits--the ones whose beliefs and values are closest to our own, even if we aren't mutual friends.  From this circle of the onion, real friendships can sometimes grow--because we have a lot in common: our politics, our books, our histories, our beliefs.

The tiny core at the center of the onion--that's friends.  Unlike the acquaintances we like better than strangers, friends are the people--most friend-definers agree--with whom we can reveal our true selves.

http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=553fc8c01c&e=7940cd5ca2

"The concentrating force that transmutes a kinship of spirit into a friendship is emotional and psychological intimacy. A friend is a person before whom we can strip our ideal self in order to reveal the real self, vulnerable and imperfect, and yet trust that it wouldn’t diminish the friend’s admiration and sincere affection for the whole self, comprising both the ideal and the real."