Temporary Friends
Consider: “We have three types of friends in a lifetime: friends for a reason, friends for a season and friends for a lifetime.”
My young twenty-something daughter is making major changes in her life. She has moved far from home (a different country!) and is beginning her grown-up life; that is to say, she is not in school anymore. She is going through that rough patch where you realize that making friends is not as easy as it used to be, or at least it’s different than it used to be. Everything is different from what it used to be. It sure doesn’t help that a young married couple she befriended there, and perhaps idealized a bit, surprised her and broke up recently, most likely irreparably. It gave her a good shake. That just wasn’t supposed to happen.
Welcome to Brothers and Sisters, the weekly meetup for prayer* and community at Daily Kos. We put an asterisk on pray* to acknowledge that not everyone uses conventional religious language, but may want to share joys and concerns, or simply take solace in a meditative atmosphere. Anyone who comes in the spirit of mutual respect, warmth and healing is welcome.
My daughter is an open heart. I swear she has a gene that drives her to want to be everyone’s friend. She doesn’t have to be everyone’s “best friend” but she does want to be the best friend she can be for everyone she meets. Her urge is to give, not take. For the most part, this works for her, though sometimes damaged people want to claim her all to themselves. Then her struggle is with boundaries. I believe most people go through life trying to figure out how to confidently lower their boundaries. My daughter has to figure out how to put them up.
In this, I see a bit of my wife. It is a rare stretch of days in which my wife doesn’t tell me how a complete stranger in a store or an office will open up and share his or her stories, many of which carry an intimate amount of pain. My wife is a trained and experienced Social Worker but this sharing, this automatic response of just being there for another person, is natural. I’ve witnessed it. I’ve witnessed it in both of them- my wife and eldest daughter. It’s as if they are lit candles in dark rooms.
Anyway, in this difficult time for my daughter, my wife brought out the quotation about reason, season and lifetime friends as a theme during a Skype conversation. For just a moment, let me say blessings to whomever invented Skype. I have a hard time conversing on the telephone because so much of my ability to understand someone else is through their facial expressions and body language. Skype is a help though I’m still not confident about talking to someone who is not in the same room.
My contribution was about friends for a reason. I brought up three colleagues who retired this past June. Each sought me out to say good-bye on the way to the door, so to speak. Each had an individual and specific relationship with me. With one, I could talk about the profession and art of teaching. With another, we could talk about student behavior and school politics. With the other, we could talk about politics in general.
All of these relationships are effectively over. We never socialized outside of the school day. The five or ten minutes we could spend with each other got us through our intense days and weeks of work. We didn’t make small talk. We talked about things that affirmed ourselves as people beyond the job we were doing. The isolation of the American teacher, cut off from physical proximity with other adults, identified in the workplace by what we do rather than who we are, tasked with great responsibility- this drives many people out of the profession and, I have observed, damages others. For a teacher, it is essential to have friends at work. Water-cooler conversations about sports or the latest movies are like sugar calories. Mentors, having one and being one, are nice but the job, the being a teacher, has to stop somewhere. Other teachers have to be glad to see you because you see and approve of what’s behind their act.
And we’re all actors, every one of us.
My wife says I could keep any of these relationships alive outside of school if I would just give it some juice, make the call, make the invite, and make the effort. She says I don’t because of my peculiar (yes, that’s the word she used) feelings about friendships. I nod my head, and then I think about my wife’s friends, the ones she talks to on the phone, goes to lunch with…her real friends.
She worked with none of them. I won’t bring that up to her. Twenty-six years of marriage is a great teacher about when to not speak.
As for friends for a season, we’ve all had them. You’re friends for a season with the parents of your kids’ soccer team, though one of my wife’s real friends is one of those moms. You’re friends for a season with the parents of your kids’ friends (and how seasonal those are, aren’t they?), though one of my wife’s real friends is one of those moms. You’re friends for a season with people you do something regularly with but on a time-limited basis, like taking a class or doing a play or singing in a choir or working on a campaign of some kind, though of couple of my wife’s real friends started there.
I think I’ve identified a pattern.
Sigh, for that matter, I think I’ve identified another pattern that affects my friendships, or lack of same. So many of these types of things are attended, or participated in, by many women and few men. Active, intelligent, talented women. One wonders where the men are. And as for making friends with the active, intelligent, talented women…well, our society is still trying to figure out how that’s supposed to work. Let’s admit that we’re all a little suspicious of friendships between men and women, especially when one or both are married. If they were both unmarried, we’d all wonder if. Just if.
I had hopes for a long friendship with the woman Rabbi at our Temple. Unfortunately, she moved out of the area. She’s gay. Straight women often have gay male friends so it should work the other way around, right?
As for lifetime friends, isn’t it interesting how little we see of them? Once upon a time, we shared a time and place with them that was so intense, so important, so constant that years later, we are so sure of each other that we don’t allow time for the ordinary.
I know that some people have lifetime friends that they hang out with all the time; they are like close brothers and sisters. I don't have that.
On the other hand, for me, my lifetime friends have a spark. There’s a charge to crossing each other’s path, even just to say “Hey.” It means there was more to our lives than just living them. It means, as well, that I wish I could, just once, package everything I feel for each of them and give it to them, so they can know for sure and forever.
Friends and brothers and sisters and the spark of something unseen and perhaps indescribable in ordinary words.
Sounds like a spiritual journey.