I sort of cheated for this blog post. Today, while looking back through some of the old writing I had done, I discovered this piece I wrote right before I graduated high school. Now, coming from a time when I was not exactly the happiest individual (pre-fiance, post-nasty breakup), I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the essay was pretty complete, and not full of dark, adolescent musings that are often so characteristic of high school writers. (If you are a high school writer, please do not take offense. I simply call it as I see it.) Anyway, instead of this essay wasting away unread on my personal computer, I decided it deserved a blog post at the very least. So there you have it. Enjoy, and as always, please comment.
I watch people. It’s what I do. What I have done for a long time now. It’s one of my personal hobbies; figuring out what makes people tick. What drives them, why they do what they do. Without being less than humble, I have to admit that I am pretty good at it. Whether I have a natural knack for figuring people out or not remains to be seen. However, what I do know is that my “hobby” is an utterly imprecise science. This is because the equation is always changing. For every two people that fit your theories, a million and a half others will defy them in such dramatic fashion as to make you throw your hands up in despair and resolve to start back at square one. (In a way this is what makes people watching fascinating, for the equation is always changing and thus is never boring. I digress.) Though it does seem that no two people will ever exactly fit the same mold (and indeed in most cases the fact is that people are unequivocally unique), the exception to this rule is that people seek interaction from other people, no matter who they are.
I do not believe that there are any true hermits among mankind; degenerates who reject human contact and revel in such rejection. In fact, I think that cases of hermits nowadays and in the past are not people who revel in zero social contact, but individuals who have been deeply wounded in their social experiences. With that being said, why do people seek this interaction? The answer is simple; because there is nothing quite like connecting with another person on their level, sharing in their thought, feelings, passions, and dreams. (On the other hand, there is also nothing quite like the intense emotional and spiritual pain that failed or abusive relationships can cause. But that is another essay entirely.)
I have come to the conclusion that the vast majority of young people, my generation, have failed in this area. Of course, they crave the connection a true friendship offers with the same intensity as man since the dawn of time, but they lack the notions needed to successfully cultivate such relationships. I recently read an article proposing a theory as to why there are such an alarming number of college dropouts among my generation. The article stated that since many students’ relationships in high school are so shallow, they go to college without any real knowledge of how to develop real and lasting friendships. Compounding the problem, they have moved away from the support group of (most of the time) real relationships; family. So, these students drop out and move back home. Why? Because they are running as fast as possible back to the true relationships in their life, back to the social nourishment they find they so desperately need.
So where does this discrepancy come from? Where does the desire for true social connection and the ability to obtain it reach an impasse? Not to be one of the prophets of doom who condemn society as the perpetrator of all of mankind’s problems (for what is society really, except for the lifestyle that even the people who rage against it have embraced?), but I do thing our society is partly to blame. More accurately, I believe it is the world we live in and have created on our own that is to blame. We have become obsessed with the news ticker, the lightning fast information flash that is the Internet. Speed and glitzy delivery has replaced all substance. Is it any surprise we have tried to apply to same system to our relationships? The results, as we can see, are less than stellar. The number of Facebook friends (who we never talk to) we have has replaced the number of vital close friends we have, who can be relied on in crisis. Talking face to face has been replaced by talking on the phone, which has been replaced by the most impersonal form of communication; text messaging. In short, we have as a community embraced a break-neck pace lifestyle, without ever stopping to smell the proverbial roses. As a result, we don’t have any idea what a rose smells or even looks like.
My point is this; friendships are not a thing to be rushed or taken lightly. We adopt the same attitude to relationships as we do to information, and it does not work. A friendship is something to be grown, it is an investment into a person. Adding them as a friend on Facebook or sending them an occasional text is not enough. To truly invest in a person, and for it to pay dividends in the future, requires that we spend time. Not the flyby, seat-of-your-pants, if-I-can-work-you-in sort of time, but the four hour conversations about life over a cup of coffee. I have found in my experience that the relationships that meant the most to me were the ones where I could tell the other person virtually anything, and I expected no less from them. In the end, those people were the ones that stood by me in crisis, were there when I was broken down to the point of giving up. The connection you have with a close friend can support you even in the face of extreme spiritual brokenness. This cannot happen with the kind of relationships we are used to developing in our lives. When the break-neck paced train of our lives finally derails and it all goes up in smoke, the people you thought you knew will inevitably abandon you to the flames. However, the people you knew you knew without a doubt, the people who you have let in to your innermost being and have let you do the same; more often than not those people will be standing alongside you until the fire is extinguished. Why? Because a true friendship, when it is real and tangible, is worth passing through even the hottest of Hell’s fires.
Proverbs 27: 17
“As iron sharpens iron,
so one man sharpens another.”
