Dear Tom:
I just shared a series of e-mails with a great friend, who I haven’t seen for a long while. For many years he was a sounding board, as I was for him. It has been good to catch up, and regret that time and distance have come between us. I am committed to try and not let our friendship end, and to work at getting it back where it belongs in my life. The friendship was important to me then, and I sense it can be again. Although distance and circumstances have changed for us both, the underlying bonds are still there intact. As I think about times long passed, I hesitate. I am mindful that when friends speak ever so much of times gone by, it’s because their present time is turning them from friends to strangers. I want to avoid saying goodbye before it is time, with other words, and ways, and silences. So when that moment is here, we will say goodbye as it should be said between friends.
Webb
Webb,
Friendship is such an important topic and is so widely misunderstood. I used to feel that, as a friendly soul, most people I knew were my friends. That perspective got me burned a couple times, but those burns turned out to be really important learning moments for me. I have come to know that my friends are really limited to the people with whom I have a deep connection, trust, love, and patience.
Hazrat Inayat Khan, the great Sufi teacher and mystic who died in the 1920s, said this about friendship: “A person begins his spiritual accomplishment by learning how to be a friend. Relationship is nourished by contact, kinship is maintained by reciprocity, but friendship is developed with love.There are three principal things to be understood in connection with friendship. The first is understanding without words. The next thing is a disinterested attitude (i.e. not looking for what benefit can be derived from the relationship). Third … is overlooking (i.e. the faults and imperfections of the other).”
Thank you for being my friend, Webb.
Tom
(quotes from Kahn’s The Art of Being and Becoming)
Thank You! Webb