Friendship Part 3

In this complex world of human endeavors, I know the way in which we build friendships are every bit as complex. We have shared experiences, we have the opportunity to discuss different experiences. Along with everything else, Aristotle defined friendship. To him there were three types of friendship: of utility, of pleasure and of the good. Being in the business of writing everything down, of course Aristotle would have the inclination to define friendship. In his day, speech and philosophy were the same disciple. And the discussion of what it took to be a good friend was part of the conversation.

The idea that there is a friendship of utility means that you have a friend who is useful to you in some way. I think this is a very common friendship when we consider the people we work with, or the people we see in school. These are certainly friends, and the common plane is the workplace. In all the years I worked restaurants, I always felt like I had a built-in circle of friends, the people I talked with during work hours and the people that I sat shoulder to shoulder with in drinking establishments that the normal people just would visit.

The camaraderie I've been blessed to have in restaurants stretching from Tucson to Portland has been real, authentic, without walls. When working in a restaurant, I find the level of inhibitions to be very low, I feel like in the brash, harsh or dirty words spoken, the people had an integrity and honesty that I don't think exists in political workplaces. That no matter what happened, no one in a restaurant wants to see another person fail. The friendship between these sorts of people is validated to keep the machine going. I suppose the restaurant culture is simply that eventually everyone will be drunk or in the process of becoming drunk again.

Friendships of utility as such are no shameful thing. When you have a friend that is useful to you in some way, it's in your best interest to be of use to that friend also. In this way, we get things done, even if it's cooking plates and plates of food for the diners who pay our way.

Friendship of pleasure, defined by Aristotle simply means being around the people whose company you enjoy. Not that this form of friendship is separate or exclusive to that of the first, it feels somehow different. There are the people we enjoy because of shared activities, or shared intimacies. As I consider my friends, there are those who I share specific hobbies or interests with and we spend our time engaged in such things. The others are people who we simple talk and the back and forth of conversation is the best way to while the hours.

The last friend, the friendship of the good based on mutual respect and admiration I find to be the most interesting. This friendship, again, is not exclusive to the other two, but it does seem to imply something a little deeper. Something a little deeper which perhaps comes from time and the work it takes to develop a friendship. I recently read an academic study that outlined the path it takes to get to this certain friendship. It takes time, yes. It takes the sharing of intimacies and discussion of feelings, troubles, triumphs. It takes a level of sincerity where both friends want the best for the other.

When I think about the reality of life, I am struck with a sense of immediacy. I feel like all the things that need to happen, need to happen or at least be happening right now. I have always felt like the notion of tomorrow is vague and distant and impossible to get to. It's a strange thing, and perhaps that has been the reason I have done all the things in life that I have done, learned all the things I have learned or gotten to experience so many things. It's a sense of immediacy because what we have today, we will not have tomorrow. And likewise, there are a great number of things that I had wanted to do when younger, things that I was unable to do for whatever reason, and now, well, now I no longer care about such things.

When it's come to my friendship over the years, I felt the same amount of immediacy. No matter where I was, there were always friends. I joke now that I have enjoyed a life of popularity. Although there may be a little truth in this, that I have know a great deal of people in life, my circle of friends has always been small, intimate. And the intensity of our time, I can now look at these friends as a measure of who I was and what we were doing. When I consider any given time, it first gets defined by time of life, location on earth, the people I was with and the subsequently generated thoughts.

The discussion of friendship leads me to question what sort of friend I am, or what sort of friend I have been. And how integral I am or have been to the journey of someone else. If I have been able to enhance or better someone else in any way that changed the course of their life for the better.

Recently, I had the occasion to visit with a very large group of people I knew over a long period of years. Many years has passed since any of us were together. This was the opportunity to revisit old times, catch up on new times, and to thank someone for saying or doing something specific. These sorts of gatherings seem to happen around the times of funerals, business closures or some sort of year milestones. Getting together like this, at least for me, was a great way to understand friendship, the way it works and grateful we all should be for it.