Friendship

Great friends and colleagues, Terry and Beth, with Pamela
and me at Northern Lights Saloon, Polebridge, MT
after a day in the back-country.

I wouldn't quite call myself a Trekkie but I do really like Star Trek. I especially like the fourth movie. At the beginning of the movie Spock's Mother asks him why he needed to return to Earth. He explained that it was because he had to testify. She said "oh, because they're your friends." To which he replied, "because I was there."  After time traveling back to the late 20th. century to find Hump Backed Whales to save the world, having their alien space craft break down, having a crew member end up in a primitive 20th century hospital, and whalers almost killing one of their whales, they return to Earth where they are to face a court martial for something they did in movie episode III.  During their adventure Spock finds himself agreeing with Bones that they needed to stay and take extraordinary risks to save Pavlov. Of course the court realizes that this motley crew had saved the Earth, so charges were dropped and everyone was happy except the Klingon ambassador. As Spock's Vulcan Father is saying goodbye he says, in good Vulcan manner, "As I recall I opposed your enlistment in Star Fleet. I may have been mistaken. Your comrades are good people." Spock didn't blink "They are my friends," he said.

My blog entitled "our journey home" made quite a hit and, at least for me, raised lots of philosophical questions which I feel somehow compelled to address.  Maybe being a seeker makes one a wee bit of a philosopher. Perhaps I should apologize for that.  I'm sure that, if there is some type of life beyond human death where the deceased can look back on those of us still here, my college philosophy professor is enjoying a good laugh at the idea of me being a philosopher. I could always make him laugh.  He was a man of my parents age who had become a Jesuit priest, taught philosophy, fell in love, and left orders to become a faculty colleague of my parents. He was great as a friend as well as a teacher. He told one class that we would be guaranteed an "A" if we could demonstrate an opposite to love. I got the "A" but it wasn't because I demonstrated an opposite to love. To the contrary, I became convinced that love does not have an opposite. He laughed hysterically when he found me reading Paul Tillich.  No matter how mundane our conversations they always seemed, in retrospect, to dip frequently into very complex and meaningful areas of life.

I took a few moments to sit down and make a list of the issues and ideas, the questions and the potential hypotheses, that my journey blog raised.  At this point there are at least eight and the list is growing.  Now being the rather analytic type, I figure that the proper approach would be to finish the list, organize it, research and prep and then start writing.  Unfortunately, or perhaps thankfully, I'm not an obsessive analytic, so I'm not going to do that. I figured that since I'm within seven months of having survived on this planet for seven full decades I need to write in my own order or preference if I want to share what I think is most important before my time is up. No reason to spend time talking about the definition of nature, participant, reality, etc., if I never get to talk about why they are important.

I ended up in bed with a cold the night I posted the Journey blog. I was so sick that it was two days before I saw how many people had read it.  I completed the blog while I was waiting for Pamela to get out of a meeting at the college system main office in Versailles, KY.  and posted it that night when we got home. On the steps going up to our room was a package which turned out to be homemade jam from friends in Washington.  Our friend, who sent the jam, had done everything from picking the fruit to filling the jars. It was not only delicious but we were honored that she would share something which represented significant time and effort with us. We met Bill and Susan when they visited Glacier to meet Bill's brother and sister-in-law, Warren and Michelle. Warren and Michelle are good friends from Hopkinsville, KY, about 90 miles south of home-base, who were coming to Glacier to visit us. Bill and Susan love the outdoors, are avid bicyclist and had just become hooked on trailering, which is what brought us together with Warren and Michelle.

The next morning, as I lay sick in bed, Pamela spoke to the good friends who were supposed to have stopped by to visit on their way home from a local Asian food market. Aseem and Plabita are another couple with whom Pamela was friends before I came along. Aseem is a physics professor. Pamela and Plabita were talking excitedly because Plabita finally received her green card so she can get her PT license.

It was just a short while later that Pamela was on the phone with Cherry.  Cherry is the head of the college library and her husband, Carl, is a professional artist. Many of you have seen the picture I posted of his painting that I bought Pamela for her birthday. It brings our Berges collection up to two. Cherry was excited about a book of poetry she was reading and ended up reading poetry to us over the phone. We had Facebook conversations with a friend who is a traveler and was somewhere in Turkey.  We always have to check his Facebook posts to see where he's living.  We dipped (is that term still around?) into the lives of other friends who were sharing great moments with their family. Then Pamela turned to me and said "we certainly have many wonderful friends."  What an understatement!

Pamela's statement seemed so obvious but it hit me that this was the next segment of the journey that deserves consideration.  So you can either credit or blame Pamela for this blog.

From time to time I have visualized the journey as a pinball machine. As the ball starts its journey from the top of the incline to the small opening between the flippers at the bottom, it bumps into objects, called bumpers, which send it in a different direction and, in some case, may actually catapult the ball. As I think about my own journey I can identify those experiences and individuals which acted as my pinball bumpers. Friends can be such bumpers propelling you in totally unplanned and unexpected direction.

But first we must define "friend".  I'm sure you're not surprised that I got 277 million results when I Goggled "friend definition".  I went through two pages and found so little variation that I stopped. The  Google definition, which was of course first, was "a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically exclusive of sexual or family relations."  (Google) One look at this one and I knew that I was going to have some problems. The majority of them noted that a friend is not usually a member of one's family. I would definitely have to take exception to that. My late wife, Diana, and for the past two years, Pamela, are both people whom I would have to call "best friends." Right now it is Pamela who patiently sits and listens as I proof read my blogs out loud.  But until we determine what constitutes a friend I guess I can't get into that argument.

Dictionary.reference.com defined friend as "a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard."  I was struck by the word 'attached'.  Merriam-Webster's first definition was "a person who you like and enjoy being with". Poor grammar for a grammatical tool but I like the idea. At first I thought the Urbandictionary.com definition was really bad. It used a psychological diagnostic term as a derogatory term. I really get upset with that. It used poor grammar and no punctuation.  But it grew on me. "... people who are aware of how retarded you are and still manage to be seen in public with you. people who make you laugh till you pee your pants. people who cry for you when one of your special items disappear. when you dont (sic) have enough money to get a (sic) ice cream, they chip in. knows all of your internet passwords. who would never make you cry just to be mean." 

I don't know about you, but the true dictionary-type definitions all left me a bit cold.  The Urban Dictionary definition seems to be a bit more of an example than a definition but in some ways was more helpful. Maybe that's because I can relate to it.

You have to admit that it takes something - not sure yet what that might be - to be seen, nevertheless associated, with a 69 year old man who has a pony tail, a yellow-diamond earring, a dragon tattoo on his arm and a a Goofy on his leg. Besides that he's an unabashed tree-huger, vegetarian, conservationist who would rather be climbing a mountain, kayaking, white-water rafting, cycling, scuba diving or living in the wilderness rather than be confined to "civilization".  Left, right, or dead center, most people are going to have something to say about such a man which may or may not be complimentary.

The Urban Dictionary definition seems to be saying that a defining quality of a friend is one who likes you regardless of your strangeness.  Regardless of our strangeness?  I can't help but think of a psychology professor that my Mother had (she was a grad-student when I was a teenager) who insisted upon, at some point, asking his classes who among them thought they were normal. My Mother always raised her hand just to torment him. I'm very glad that we don't have to try to define 'normal'. Since I'm not proposing a doctoral dissertation, can we save time and agree that we all have our quirks?

Can we conclude without massive evidence or extensive time going through the steps of logic, that at least one of the attributes of a friend is, in a word, acceptance?   I have people whom I consider good friends and whom I like very much but they consider roughing it to be staying in a three-star hotel instead of a five star hotel.  I have people whom I consider good friends and whom I like who are spiritually polar opposites to me.  I accept their differences. In fact, I can not think of any of our friends who do not have some difference.  So, we must then ask, are we friends because we are accepting or are we accepting because we are friends?  Dang it! I'm making this tougher than I meant.

Should we focus on the "feelings of affection or personal regard"?  I really hate to consider this one because it then forces me to ask what causes the feelings of affection. Why are we drawn to affection for another person?  Over the years I have had many situations where I had an un-explainable affection toward another person - usually a patient - which was not necessarily returned nor would I call them a friend. An example is the non-verbal man who was sent to my special secured unit from the State Hospital. He would steal any food or drink left unattended and hit without apparent provocation. It took almost a year of hard work to train him but mostly train the staff. I knew his personal history and I had an affection for him despite the fact that he'd hit me with all his might if I got in his way . . . which I unfortunately had to do frequently. It would seem then that affection might be a part of friendship, but it is not unique to friendship and isn't that which makes a friend.

We can also see from simple observation that there are levels of friendship. I have people whom I like but I do not know well, we share a common interest but not to the point that we keep in contact to talk about it, and I have no driving desire to tell them about life experiences and events. Perhaps we should call such people acquaintances . . . the most basic level of friendship. On the other extreme there are those, like a mate, with whom you share everything and have a driving desire to talk and spend time with them especially when there is a special life experience.

To save time and my poor brain, let's take a short-cut. The one thing we can say about all of the definitions is what they are lacking, viz. none of them says why there is personal attachment, etc. There seems to be a missing ingredient.  Perhaps I'm really asking for a cause of friendship rather than a definition of friendship. Be that as it may, let's push on.

I'm really going to go out on philosophical thin ice here and propose that the missing ingredient is the realization that friendship begins at a point where our journeys collide. I'm going to propose that some factor(s) in that collision creates friendship.  Quantum mechanics shows how a particle collision results in (1) one or both of the particles going off in different directions, (2) the creation of one or more different particles while one or more of the particles that collided disintegrate, and (3) they may both become a part of something new. Can we take a page out of quantum theory and apply it to friendship?

Obviously in Possibility 1 I am assuming that no human encounter leaves us proceeding directly on the same course as before. Since there is nothing in the physical world that can come physically close without being effected by the gravitational pull of one another I can see no reason to assume that we can come physically and emotionally close to another human being without some course change even if that course change is to avoid the encounter. If nothing else, we are constantly learning. When we stop learning we are dead.  We are going to take some data from the most casual and meaningless encounter with another human being which means that our being has been effected and our course is changed.  What then happens when the encounter is something more than mundane and uneventful? That takes us to Possibility 2.  But it doesn't explain what happened in that event, the encounter, the collision of life's journeys that created friendship.

What I fear is the more we dig the more questions arise and fewer answers we will have. I'm already seeing this happening. It is easy to identify those things which attract us; viz. common interest, values and history.  It may be impossible to identify that which turns those attractants into the glue which creates a life-long bond of friendship. Is it chemical or psychological?

While all of our friendships are very special and very dear to us, we can look at a few that practically define the question.  We have friends whom we met on-line. By the time that we finally met face-to-face we hugged and talked as though we had been dear friends our entire lives. That level of friendship has endured.  At the same time we have friends whom we met one day and by the time we parted company one would have thought we were life-long friends. That level of friendship has likewise endured.  Both of those friends (couples) share multiple common interests and values, but we have many acquaintances with whom we share common interests and values but do not have the deep abiding friendship.  And to make things really confused, there is a man whom we would call a good friend whose kind words or advice are a treasure to us and I've never met him.  We follow each other literally around the world on Facebook.

Perhaps what I'm trying to do is like trying to find an opposite to love. It isn't going to happen. It might be that we must be content with being able to identify attributes of a friend and be satisfied with knowing that somehow our life journeys collided in such a way as to create this relationship we call friendship.