Friends
“Each
friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they
arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
Anais Nin
The importance of friends
cannot be overstated. Especially for those of us who, by fate or by
choice, live alone. We depend upon friends to fill the gaps in our
lives for intimacy and community. And with each friend, we are
different; we engage a different part of our personality and
co-create a language geared to that particular relationship. For the
time that we are together, we create a small world in which only two
people exist.
In our friends we see
reflections of ourselves—often, they hold up a mirror of our shadow
side. It may be a part of us that is undeveloped, or that hides
because of lack of courage. We can live vicariously through them.
When they do things of which we disapprove, we may find ourselves
being judgmental, trying to coerce them to do otherwise because we
need them to be who we need them to be, and not who they are.
Sometimes, they provide a template for all our secret desires, and
our secret fears. In the words of Anais Nin, “We don't see
things [or people] as they are, we see them as we are.”
Friends provide an
opportunity to grow in self-knowledge, or to avoid that growth by
projecting onto them what we don't want to see in ourselves. They
provide a garden in which we can germinate new seeds of self; an
ocean on which to travel to foreign territories of relationship.
Friends are essential. I hope today, you will look with gratitude
upon the deep friendships that you have—those that support and
engage you, those that expand your mind and your heart, and those
that simply drive you crazy. They are reflections of you, and you are
reflections of them.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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