The Nature of Friendship

“We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people’s lives.”

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Over the years I’ve made some good friends, some passing friends and some great friends. In retrospect, never have I been able to accurately predict which people would fall into each category and it seems I’m even worse at hypothesizing which of those friendships, once formed, would survive a challenge such as separation. Reflection also reveals that when thrust into new situations and social circles, those with whom I become fast friends are rarely lasting friends.

I’ve read many articles that indicate that the strongest relationships are built on a foundation of shared values. And since your personal value system is generally determined by the time you begin, or at the very least complete, high school, it follows that you are most likely to share a value system with someone who also shares your background. I agree with this idea to a point. Some of my very best friends I’ve known since high school or even earlier. Arguably, these are the friends who understand me best. One, I think, can even read my thoughts through MSN. It’s almost creepy really.

That said, many of my friends were born and raised in countries very different from my beautiful, expansive and safe Canada. Now I wouldn’t say the value systems of these friends are fundamentally different from my own. In some cases there may appear to be great disparities, though certainly there are also many commonalities. A fundamental difference between myself and these people though, is background. Sometimes it seems we share little more than post secondary education. It is these differences in background, and, what is more important, in the perspective derived from these differences, that makes these friendships so rich and so dear to me. Perhaps I’m secretly a bit of a sadist to find joy in the friction that comes from working to try to bridge the gap in understanding between two people from such different cultures when I could simply avoid the trouble and spend my time with people who share my general background and should therefore have some degree of innate understanding of myself. But then I suppose I don’t consider working to understand someone better work at all.

There are two aspects of friendship that I think boggle me the most. First, the speed and ease with which I am able to befriend some people, knowing that I can trust them with every detail of my life and thoughts almost instantly upon meeting them, contrasted to the intense guardedness I display when meeting other people, with months of acquaintance building only small amounts of trust. While I only met one person who fell into the first category before graduating high school I have since been fortunate enough to meet several others. Sadly these individuals are by far the minority, as it seems I am generally a very untrusting person. As best I can figure, there is no outward characteristic that distinguishes these special friends from everyone else around me - not race, sex, nationality or even age. The only conclusion I am able to draw from my experience is that while I cannot predict when it will happen I somehow instinctually know when I meet these people.

The second aspect that has repeatedly confounded me is the survival rate of friendships. When I moved cities several years ago I thought I had a pretty good idea of which friendships were strong enough to survive the change and which would fall by the wayside. As it turns out I was damn near 100% wrong. Friendships that had only just begun to bud before my relocation deepened into strong bonds which I hold very dear whereas those ties I considered binding seemed to break quite easily under the strain. Even more confusing are those favourite friendships of mine, the ones that seem to require zero maintenance. I consider myself fortunate in the extreme to have friends who I may not see or speak to for months or even years only to find that when fate brings us together again it’s as if we had a heart-to-heart just the day before.

Each one of us passes through the lives of an infinite number of people and an innumerable number of individuals form the extras in our own stories. So what determines which of those passersby becomes a regular, even permanent, fixture in your life? Having had the pleasure and privilege of meeting hundreds, possibly even thousands, of people in the last few years I have found people who fits each of the descriptions outlined above and a many, many more who don’t fall so neatly into a category. I have also met many, many people and thought to myself, “We could be good friends, great friends even, if only circumstance would allow us.” Now I’m not one for washing my hands of responsibility and leaving the formation of friendships (or anything else for that matter) entirely up to fate, but there are gaps that are difficult to bridge if not given the right opportunity. In my experience the most common of these gaps is distance. Most friendships require that two people spend a significant amount of time together to form a bond and living hundreds or thousands of kilometres apart tends to prevent this. Nonetheless, it breaks my heart a little each time I happen to meet one of the “extras” and silently wish that they would take on a bigger role in my life. I suppose all I can do is count myself fortunate for meeting these individuals and hope that someday circumstance will allow the could have been to become reality.