So we protect our hearts.
Which is good. We should. But how do we have committed community during this time of uncertainty? Can we foster a type of community without the commitment or is that just a facade of masked insecurities?
So we end up lonely.
This is not kind of lonely you find in a social context. There are plenty of people around. You have lots of friends. Good friends but temporary friends. This is the kind of lonely when you are in a crowded room. Lonely, sitting on a porch swing with just your ambitions and zero direction on how to fulfill them. Swinging. Swinging. Swinging softly...with your feet off the ground.
The kind of lonely when you are doing life by yourself.
So here we were, friends at the breakfast table. Laughing but hesitant to commit to one another to laugh another day. In a caper with one another. We dance without any vows. No wedding. No promises. No slick dancing floor. No lasting growth.
For all I know we are just incidentally friends. Aristotle said that that incidental friends aren’t easily acquired, friendship in it’s truest form can’t be incidental, “for things that are only incidentally connected are not often coupled together.”
Is the warrior quintet friends just as incidentally as the light currently bounding from wall to surface and surface to squirrel?
And all of this, the culmination of these questions, theories, observations, and that damn fat squirrel, boils down to: Should I even have friends?
Which reminds me of when Warrior Grayson and I discuss books of the bible like Ecclesiastes or Revelations. When we read these books it seems like there is no reason to do anything, because ultimately it amounts to nothing. Solomon shows us that nothing matters, Grayson would say. I’m eventually going to die and the world is going to explode. Why do anything?
I finished my Raisin Bran with vanilla yogurt instead of milk, which is heavenly and I highly recommend it. I busied myself with packing and cleaning for the day’s activities. The Warrior Dash was becoming the priority of the day, just as we knew it would. Holly compliments me on the morning music choice. She was probably trying to make up for the negative comment she gave me on my music choices on the drive up to Dallas. I gave her a hard time for the comment, really just for fun and lively banter, however, I probably should have made that more known to her.
There has to be more than just useful friends, I thought. There must be more than pleasant friends; something more to the reason of why the Bible has Revelations and Ecclesiastes; something greater than death and more than the earth singing the drudge of kaboom.
I would like to believe in a reoccurring dream that I keep having. A reverie where I am committed to someone for a greater purpose than just my pleasure or my utility. Where I am committed and live in community. Something that is essentially good and continues to be good.
My greek friend’s third friendship was one that is called the good. A friendship where loving is more the essence of friendship than being loved. Selfless love.
He called it perfect friendship, often saying that people in this friendship are good people individually in virtue and in character and mutually wish well upon each other and desire what is good for one another above their on interests. These friends are not incidental. They choose one another - they commit to one another.
Vows. Promises. Slick dance floors. Lasting growth. Sinatra.
Aristotle asserts that the friendship of the good can both be pleasurable and useful but it is something greater than that. Except useful and pleasurable are grounded within selflessness.
It can be pleasurable and it can be useful but those are particulars of the form good. It’s beginning to sound like Plato’s divided line theory.
“Such a friendship is as, might be expected, permanent” because “their friendship lasts as long as they are good - and goodness is an enduring thing.”
Because goodness is an enduring thing.
What I am talking about is a belief in a Meta-Narrative. The reason that every little nuance of our actions and lives become meaningful; story. The transcending story that God is making something Good and we are apart of that, every soul of every age. God is making something Good through us. However, we can make something very bad of it, if we aren't intentional enough.
Lasting. Enduring. Good.
And this renders every friendship meaningful.
What great hope. This is what I want my marriage to look like. This reciprocating ‘love more than you are loved’ thing. A committed community resounding in meaningful caper with my wife and children. I am often worried that I will forget this principle by retreating into my habits of selfishness. I am often praying that I don’t surrender my love to just myself.
Hope. It’s rising like the flood waters of the photosynthesized light and smooth music.
The aged music fits the aged home. It’s the kind of house that Billie Holiday can stretch her arms in. I daydream about doing life in a home such as this, a wife and children living that life with me. Spending a sunday morning in laughter and lively play.
In that daydream, when given the chance - when moments of committed love and life long companion’s caper occur - the music will push itself into every inch of the home. Filling the home like the leafy light of that sunday morning.
Leaving the house, I thought to myself as I turned the iPod off, "at least we had this time together."
Maybe that time, those friendships, wasn't a waste after all. Even if I never saw those warrior again, or that squirrel, those friendships were never a waste.
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