The medicine is clearly going to my head
As I promised myself I would do, I’m taking it easy today - doing laundry from our trip (only four more loads to go!), reorganising my toiletries (only 500 more bottles and jars to go!), trying to nurse myself back to health, and catching up on blog reading. I’d let 17 posts from Ben Casnocha go unread, because I like to take more time than I had in the US to process what Ben writes, so I bit the bullet earlier and ploughed right in there.
One post of Ben’s that really grabbed me was about whether a best friend can be a composite, or whether the concept of a best friend is outdated. I have been thinking a lot about this as I move through the different social circles I have scattered around the world and marvelling at how fortunate I am to have so many friends who provide so much of what I crave in human relationships. I connect with lots of people on differing levels of a multitude of matters, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
When I meet someone and really connect with him or her, I fall easily into friendship and am pretty willing to give whatever I can to a person who groks me, helps me in even the smallest ways, and feels comfortable enough to come to me for support or help, too. For instance, my friendships with Tim Taylor (who I met through Ben) and Robert Avrech (who I met through Luke Ford and Cathy Seipp) developed so quickly that it might strike other people as strange. (Also, meeting new friends through already trusted friends does seem to move things along at a faster clip; this also relates to how online credibility works, but I’ll save that for another post.)
It may sound like I am opening myself up for a lot of disappointment, but my record is solid: Over the years, I have only been mistaken about one person I considered one of my best friends, which (sucky as the experience was) is a ratio I am happy to live with and accept. Lucky me. Sure, there are others with whom I’ve lost contact for long periods or to whom I may only speak once a year or so, but in those cases that is never awkward.
Heh. While I was typing this, two texts from two friends came in at once. One was from Siobhan, saying she had nothing to report but was thinking of me, and another was from Adrian, saying there was no defined purpose for his text but he was wondering how Antoine and I are doing. With my friends and with Antoine, I try hard every day to earn that kind of care and thoughtfulness. Though I probably fall short quite often, I do comfort myself with the thought that I have a lot of people to spread myself amongst.
So while there are a couple of people I have been known to refer to as my ‘best friend,’ the truth is that friendship isn’t a contest and it’s somewhat silly to portray it in such a way. I cannot point to one of my friends and say, “Yeah, he’s definitely the best” - even with Antoine, it’s wrong to compare our relationship to platonic ones, and I’m equally as glad that he has many friends who meet needs of his that I can’t or won’t (like talking for hours about battlefield strategies of WWII or watching sports on television). And I don’t feel the need to be anyone else’s one and only ‘best friend’. As with success at work, at home, and in other interests, I think you can have have it all (quality and quantity) in friendship, though not necessarily all at the same time.