Someone recently told me I should blog more. I often find myself with all sorts of interesting thoughts and I think, I should blog about that, but then life happens and I don't. I think I will try though. My kids are getting older and are less needy so perhaps the time will open up. We will see.
Lately, I have found myself thinking a lot about friendship. What do REAL friends look like, as opposed to "Facebook" friends? How do you know how to be a good friend? Can friendship look different for different people?
I have decided that friendship IS different for different people and with different people. I have a different relationship with my best friend from seventh grade than I do with my best friend from adulthood. I love them both, but the friendships are different, partly because they are different and partly because we have been through different things together. I don't see either of them daily yet our friendships survive based on those shared memories.
How do you know how to be a good friend? I believe that is a learned skill. One which is most often picked up by being the beneficiary of a good friendship. I have learned a lot about being a thoughtful friend from my friend Britt. I have never met someone as thoughtful as her. I have learned about how to be a good mommy friend from my friend Lindsey. There is no subject that is off limits, no competitiveness about our kids or condemnation of the choices we each make, just a constant sounding board tempered by accountability and encouragement. I have learned how to be a godly friend from my friend Tami, no gossip, no judgement, no selfishness, only love. My first lessons in friendship I learned from my mom, my original best friend. She was not my best friend until past the stage where I needed a mom not a friend, yet I learned about compassion, patience and empathy from her early on. If you did not have a mom like that and if you spent a lot of time around friends who trashed you behind your back and if you have not been the recipient of good friendship, can you learn to be a good friend? I think you can. I actually think you just learn to be a friend because there really is no such thing as a bad friend. A friend by its' very definition is good.
I think that you learn how to be a friend by first befriending yourself. If you do not have kindness, compassion, grace and love for yourself, you don't have any idea how to extend it to others. When you can give yourself the freedom to just be without demanding more, better, different; than you can open up room for those around you to just be also. What a difficult journey that is though. We are often far kinder to others than we are to ourselves. I recently went through a dark spell where I was feeling really bad about myself. I was talking to a friend on the phone and saying all these negative things about myself when she stopped me. She said, you can't talk about my friend that way. It was a wake up call for me because I would never allow someone to talk about my friend that way, why would I allow myself to talk to me that way. I also would never allow someone to talk about one of my friends that way. How do we stop trash talking ourselves? If you figure it out let me know.
I think one of the other difficult things about friendship is that for many people, like myself, there is an endless supply. I have room in my life for all kinds and varieties of friends. The only problem is that I have a finite supply of time. I can only give my time to so many people. That is more of a balance issue than a friend issue but what does one do with that?
I recently read an article titled "Is Facebook Making us Lonely?" The theory is our breadth of friendship has grown but the depth of those friendships is shallower. Then there is the despair around the status update. No one has commented. No one likes my status. What does that mean? Does no one like me? I mean really, are all 435 of your "friends" really friends? That is not actually possible.
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. When we deceive ourselves about our friendships it only complicates our lives and leaves us with false expectations. We end up with expectations of friendship that no one can ever live up too which only adds to the complexities of friendship.
Alas, like everything else, I think the bottom line is it takes practice, like most everything else in life.
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