How do you make friends? When was the last time you thought about how you make friends?
My friends are one of the core pillars of my life. They are mooring ropes that keep me from washing out to sea and they are the collective witnesses to my actions. Friendship is belonging, connection and community.
One of the great wonders of our existence is why we make friends at all, not just for convenience, or exchange of skills or items, acknowledgement of mutual benefit. I’m also not talking about romantic or intrigue-based blossoming friendships. Just, friends. Why do we do it? Why do we become heavily invested in other people, why does what they think of us and what we create so vital? Why do we lay aside other commitments to see them, to support them, to lift them when they crumble, to lean on when we crumble? Why do we trust them with ourselves?
I think it’s ‘I like you as a human being, I’d like to know more about you as a human being and importantly, I’d like you to know me as a human being.’
I am Jaz and amongst many other defining elements of my existence, these are my friends. It’s an extension of my identity. The people around me are people who reflect my existence.
I spoke to one of my brothers the other day who opened with the line ‘I made a new friend today’. Someone he had met as they walked their dogs. My brother is 30 years old and delivered one of the most wonderfully innocent and hopeful sentences I had heard in ages. I made a new friend today. Making new friends is a risk, I got to a certain point in life and thought, well I now have a slightly fuller picture of the complexity of sharing my existence with other people, the squidgy underbelly of my hopes for life carried off by someone who suddenly stopped talking to me 18 years ago. The hot, stony betrayal of a friendship dissolved through conflict, romantic expression, revelation of beliefs or a mistake. Making new friends is a risk, and a hugely important risk and of course maintaining friendships is a risk.
Belonging, connection and community are what we strive to build and help others to build. Colleagues within the industry have devoted years to guiding clients towards these and as a guiding philosophy I can think of little better.
Perhaps it’s that I need to know that I was picked for no other reason than who I am, to be on the receiving end of someone’s most precious resource, time. Only then to talk to them about my favourite tree for thirty-eight minutes and about why the alto saxophone in Bowie’s Young Americans is the best alto saxophone recording in pop music.
To my friends, and to those who were once my friends, to those friends who are no longer here and to those who one day might be my friends, thank you for helping me become who I am, I wouldn’t be the same without you.
