Friendships

I have a confession to make.  I am a bit like the character Phoebe from the Friends sitcom, a bit airy with a strong artsy streak.  Phoebe is the caricature of eccentricity as well as soulful spontaneity.  I’m also a bit like Monica from that same sitcom, compulsive about cleanliness and tidiness.  I was inspired to blog about this after a decadently lazy evening exerting considerable mental energy watching these reruns.

Phoebe

In college, I had developed a habit of spontaneously blurting out expressions of total honesty, sometimes bordering on psychic, and often faux pas.  This quirk of mine was well known by my friends and many of the faculty and was jokingly referred to as a “Christy” (as in, she just did a “Christy”).  These Christys were always from the heart, often blurted with passion, and usually totally inappropriate to the social situation.  Fortunately, my friends understood the context of these utterances and they thought me somewhat comical.  In retrospect, I am so grateful for the acceptance that my friends had (and have) for my propensity to committing these potent and often humorous social kinks.  I wouldn’t know how to stop them if I tried.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them. – Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Monica

I like to keep a clean house, yet I have allowed myself to become unkempt on the inside.  So many of my past unresolved emotions and traumas lay strewn within.  I suppose this is true of many people, but in my case, this dissonance between my self-ideal and my self-image demands immediate resolution.   So it’s spring cleaning of the depths.  I wash my surroundings with compulsion, but all the while the inside has been so busy wrestling with life’s knocks and turns, mixing up a caustic cauldron of parental grief, emotional upheavals, and spiritual pain.  I don’t want it to ripple out, setting in motion anything less than blessings to others.

“Friendship with oneself is all important because without it one cannot be friends with anybody else in the world.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

Friends

True friends are the structure within which we have the freedom to experiment and grow, without fear.  They are like the wonderful phrases of music including those proverbial spaces between the notes, the ones we can enjoy complete silence with as well as exchange witty repartee.  With friends there is mutual acceptance and a genuine interest in the well-being of the others.  In essence there is love.

“A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down.”  – Arthur Glasgow