Note to All Friends

This is a quote I just ran across that I'd like to apply to all of my friendships because I think it's a good mantra.  It's meaning is quite different taken out of context and applied liberally to all relationships--I hope that Griffin & Sabine won't mind:

I wonder if we will ever understand how and why we are linked.  Griffin, why try?  Let us simply take pleasure in each other.

So many friendships spring up out of unusual circumstances and via chance--does that make them more ephemeral and weightless or does that make them even more valuable?  In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the relationship between Tomas and Tereza was born of six improbable fortuities:

But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?

Chance and chance alone has a message for us.  Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute.  Only chance can speak to us.  We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.

Is that how we should weigh friendships, pull out a piece of paper and add up the number of chance occurrences that led to the birth of the friendship?  Hell no, we just do that in novels and to pass the time maybe when we've had too many drinks.  How much better to take pleasure in each other, to occasionally borrow someone else's eyes, to give help when needed and receive support in times of trouble. 

Comments

[Lynn]

There are some who would say that a one hour encounter over a picnic table in a back yard could never be the springboard for a friendship. Others might say two people with many, many opposing viewpoints could never be friends. But, they would all be wrong.....and I am better for that.

[Lynn]

Oh, and by the way, it was announced this morning that John Wall has selected Kentucky as his showplace next year. Oh, please, please, please let the Tar Heels be on Kentucky's schedule next year.

[Robin]

i'll have to read that G&S thing sometime and you reminded me that i have wanted to reread unbearable for awhile now. i think i might have a slightly different take on it since the first time i read it, almost 15 yrs ago!!

[Jay]

If there is one word that defines what I'm learning about my existence these days, it's "relationship", and the value they hold, and how successful ones are the barometer of a full life.