We can make friends with others. This process must go through stages to reach "good friend" or "best friend." To maintain a friendship, we must continue to "act like a friend." Although a noun, "friendship," cannot be fixed and static. Like a garden, it must be alive and cared for.
The principal mode for demonstrating friendship is conversation. Christmas cards are nice, as are postcards from abroad and birthday gifts. Even email messages are helpful for staying connected, especially if they are addressed only to one person. However, while these may have a personal touch, they are less personal than a living voice transmitting spontaneous words.
Even a few decades ago, connecting by long-distance phone was costly,
about $1.00 per minute in today's money. For many persons, air travel costs were prohibitive. To connect, good friends often drove by car and stopped along the way to stay for a day or two with either close friends or relatives. Because we humans are tribal, we need to get up close and personal once in a while to renew our sense of touch and sound and smell of friends. We need to update our pictures of our friends with some face-time.
Sociologists have written extensively about the rugged individualism of Americans and the attendant attitude that we are self-reliant and don't need others. About 25 years ago, Robert Bellah of U.C. Berkeley described these shifts in the book he edited, the now-classic "Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life." (1989) Americans have
become more insular and independent from one another.
Is frequency of contact a part of friendship? I think so, especially if contact is easy, as with a phone call. I understand friendships to be living things, like gardens, that need attention, water and plant food, lest they die for want of care. The idea that friendships, once established, are static and permanent, is false. All is change. People change. Life changes. The only effective way to stay current with changes that happen is personal contact.
How can busy people do this? Here are some ways:
- Schedule a "friendship conversation" regularly, even if only occasionally. Make your time with friends at least as important as a routine dental check-up.
- 2. Show interest in major events in a friend's life: illness, promotions, and significant family events like births and deaths, and matters like these:
"I've heard that your son has been in an accident."
"I'm sorry, but the lump is malignant."
"We're phasing out your department."
3. Be reciprocal. Friendship is a two-way street. Don't wait to be contacted. Take the initiative.
4. Sometimes friends just want compassionate listening from you, a chance to tell their story so they can say it aloud and sort through their issues.
Brenda Ueland writes that "Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. You can see that when you think how the friends that really listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius as though it did us good, like ultraviolet rays."
5. Small thoughtful things can be big things to others. A 5-minute phone call. A surprise lunch invitation. A walk together in the park. A dozen cookies baked in your own oven and personally delivered to a friend.
6. Create an occasional "friends get-together" evening, perhaps only once every few months, that gives you a chance to catch up with several friends at one time.
When I was a child, my Swedish grandparents stayed current with the lives of their country neighbors. Despite having no phones and slow postal service, despite bumpy country roads and Model-T Fords, they always seemed to know about their friends and neighbors miles away. No doubt chance encounters at the general store, or the pitching-in to build a new
barn to replace the one that burned down, or weekly church services provided the face-time necessary for staying current with friends.
In those days, there was much physical work to be done, but many fewer emotionally numbing distractions, such as striving to succeed, endless hours entranced before the Tiny Vision set, and constant appetites
of consumerism that demanded "More, more, more!"
One common concern I hear from parents of teens and young adults today is that "My kids won't talk with me. They insist that we communicate by texting!" Brief text messages are no substitute for phone and face-time conversations because they cannot express the nuances of the human voice and body.
Fortunately, you don't have to succumb to the false notion that friendships, once established, take care of themselves. With a little extra mindfulness and a few changes of our habits, we can both nourish -- and be nourished by -- our friends.
Let me include the wise words of George Washington, first President of the United States:
- "A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man, that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of friends; and that the most liberal professions of goodwill are very far from being the surest marks of it." --George Washington, - 1732 - 1799
(My motto for this newsletter has long been that "Better Conversation Makes a Better World." Kinder, warmer, more understanding conversation surely
makes better friends.)
A few years ago, I re-friended two former colleagues in Arizona. I used a few hours of spare time around a conference I was attending in Phoenix to have dinner with one, coffee with another. I hadn't seen either of them for about 20 years, even though I had kept in contact by postal mail and an occasional phone call.
Until next week,
Loren
