friendship [a lost art]

While trying to gain a fresh perspective on what it really means to be in community with other folks, I’ve come to realize a deficiency in my life: friendship. Not so much having friends, but being a friend. Like so many things in life that are meaningful, being a friend involves sacrifice. It is a sacrifice of time, convenience and self.

Simple friendship is a lost art in a world that equates progress with efficiency (the conquering of time) and convenience. It’s quite a paradox to live in a world where we spend countless hours developing ways to make life more convenient – in hopes of creating more time for ourselves – yet, we end up being lonely and isolated. If we are honest with ourselves, you and I cannot conquer or create time. Time is and will always be, whether we are breathing or not. Instead of focusing our attention on what we have control over – that being our actions – we tend to focus our attention on trying to control that which we cannot – that being time. What would happen if we exerted more energy thinking about how to sacrifice time, rather than how to conquer it?

Pure friendship is a lost art in a world defined by agendas or conditions. “Friends…check” is a lyric at the end of John Mayer’s song Something Missing and it might as well be a modern-day mantra for how most of us actually view friendship. It’s just another item on our checklist. We – and I include myself in this – like the idea of having friends, but actually being a friend is quite a different matter. The idea of having friends is an agenda – it serves our ego and personal purposes. To be a friend or to be anything requires of us attention and intention. It demands that our attention be on our neighbor and that our intent is to serve our neighbor. Pure friendship requires sacrifice of self.

Admittedly, friendship is continually on the verge of becoming less of a reality and more of an ideal for me. Like many people, I’m self-centered, yet, my admission does nothing without action to the contrary.