friends – sethlewis.ie

Stop Looking For Friends, And Start Making Them

The treasure of true friendship is some of the richest, most valuable wealth in the whole world. If financial poverty eventually makes life unsustainable, friendship poverty makes it unbearable. By true friendship, of course, I don’t just mean acquaintances you enjoy a laugh with every once in a while, or online “friends” you can share pictures of your dinners with. I mean the real thing. The deep thing. The close thing. The uninhibited, understanding, unhurried and unbreakable thing. I mean the people who stick even when other people let go, the people who love you even after you’ve done wrong—and too much to let you get away with it. I mean the people who laugh with you about stupid inside jokes and cry with you about losses and disappointments and who know exactly what you’re thinking just by the faces you make. I mean the people you can trust enough to share life with—not just the social media highlight reel life, but the really real life, in all the mess and joy and shame of it. Friendships like these are more valuable than Blackbeard’s buried treasure (which is still buried, by the way). If we discovered his treasure hoard without ever developing true friendships, our lives would still be impoverished. Which raises the question: how do we find the treasure of true friendship?

Slowly (a poem)

Sometimes it’s better to slow down to stay with someone else.

I see him walking

Slowly

Across the field
He’s old
But not so old
To move so slow

My eye follows
The lead he holds
That leads to
His companion—
Whose tail is wagging

Slowly

The Same Old Faces

My wife and I are planning to make some improvements to our garden this year, and one of the things we’d like to do is plant a new miniature apple tree. We like planting trees. It’s fun to anticipate what a newly planted tree will become in the years ahead. But there’s the rub: “years ahead.” Because if you want to eat the fruit from a tree, you need to give it time. A lot of time. You need to let it grow, put down roots, and become part of the ordinary, everyday scenery. It’s only after you look out of the window for years at the same old tree that you start to be able to reap the full harvest of fruit and shade and beauty and all that a tree can be in its maturity. By that time, the tree is nothing like new. The initial excitement of planting eventually gives way to a more settled appreciation and enjoyment of the tree as a part of everyday life.

Two Powerful Skills You Already Have

Walking and eating are two of the most fundamentally basic human skills—the kind of things we learn in infancy. But I have found that walking and eating are also two of the most powerful contexts for experiencing human connection. What do we suggest when we want to see someone? More often than not, it involves eating at some point. Or walking. Or both.

How An Attempted Car Theft Taught Me To Love Where I Live Even More

Last Friday evening, I finally got around to cleaning and washing the car, and refilling the windscreen wash. I can’t remember the last time I did any of that, which might tell you something about what it looked like before. The next morning, telling jokes along the way, my children and I walked out to the car to drive to basketball. When we got there I noticed that the driver’s side door frame was bent several inches away from the car. When I opened the door, I understood why: the steering column had been torn apart and the ignition wires were dangling loose.

Someone had tried to steal our car.

How To Turn A Clique Inside Out

Cliques. They’re awful, aren’t they? We love to hate them (probably because we feel like they hate us). They’re easy targets for our criticism, all selfish and exclusive and proud, and who do they think they are treating other people like they don’t matter and barely exist at all? Cliques are bad.

That is, until we’re in them. But the cliques we’re in aren’t cliques at all, because cliques are one of those odd realities that can only be seen and recognised from the outside. From the inside, they look completely different. From the inside, all we can see is camaraderie, companionship, support, and fun jokes that no one else understands. Who calls their closest friend group a “clique”? Maybe it happens, but I’ve never heard anyone use that name for themselves and their own friends. As far as I can tell, the name is always applied to other people in other groups—especially the groups we happen to feel a particular sense of exclusion from.

A Great Way To Make Friends

He put down his coffee cup and summarised the problem:

“All I do is work, and take care of the children. When I get free time, I’m tired. I could go out, but what would I do? I don’t have friends to go anywhere with.”

He’s lonely. And he’s not the only one. He may not realise it, but he’s got plenty of company in that feeling. There are so many variations of it, in so many different kinds of people—married, single, young, old—and the feel-good Christmas movies and songs playing constantly right now only highlight the problem more.

Someone Else’s City

I took a walk on someone else’s street, someone else’s everyday avenue, in someone else’s city. To me, it was all new. I’d never seen the buildings before, or the trees, and the next corner was a complete mystery that drew me on to look and discover. I didn’t know anyone who lived there, or who their cousins were, or what church they were baptised in. But they knew.