Friendship

It's a word that many take for granted every day, including myself. "Friendship." You're "friends" with the guy across the street, your funny coworker, your roommate's colleague. But you're also friends with your best bud from your childhood, your confidant from high school, and your floormate from the dorms in college. You're friends with your classmates, your associates, your roommates, your neighbors.

So how do we distinguish between them?

I have been talking with a friend who was never really my friend until recently. And she is always talking about love - the capacity we have for it, its importance in life. She is so good at projecting her love, and letting others see it. Whereas I... not so much. Love is one of those things that we can't just let exist - we do have to work to express it, and I have trouble with that.

The ancient greeks have at least five different words for love, all different, describing different understandings of the complexities of love. Mania, love of possession, or obsession, storge, love of a mother for her child, eros, love of the body, or physical love, philia, love of the mind, or virtue, equality, and familiarity that is felt along with kinship, and agape, love of the soul. From greeceindex.com, "Agape is the highest form of love there is. This is an unconditional love for others in spite of their character flaws and weaknesses. It is a difficult love to obtain simply because we, as humans, are usually concerned more with ourselves and how the world and people around us affect us. In order to love in the agape way, we must overcome our selfishness and look to the needs of others."


This is how I feel about my friends. It is more than the typical friendly love, the philia, although there are many for whom I have that love as well.  And while I struggle to show it, and try to overcome my earthly burdens, I want to remind them. To let them know they are on my mind daily. And although my love for them is intangible, I spent the last week making this for them, in hopes that they will see it and know that they mean the world to me.


To my friends: