Friendship: A Common Purpose

Hey everyone!

Because someone (I did) forgot my notes this morning pertaining to the Taoism post this was initially supposed to be, we’re going to talk about something different and sort of impromptu.  Besides, I’m PRETTY sure a Taoist would appreciate the ability to adapt to the situation without missing a beat First, I have a question for all of you: What is a friend? We use the word friend to mean a variety of things ranging from “This is a person I barely met and maybe couldn’t give to shits about, but it’d would be impolite to say that” to “This is someone I’d take a bullet for.” And of course there are the myriad nuanced definitions in between.  My question is, why do we ascribe the term friend to the shallower end of the spectrum at all?

            Aristotle famously said that a friend was a single soul which dwelled in two bodies.  I like that, but it makes me feel like friend and soulmate are synonymous, and because of that, a singular and exclusive term, in the same way as “There can be only one (Highlander).” So I went off to look for an alternate friendship model that encompassed an idea of social networking with Aristotelian closeness.  I found it in an unexpected place: while in a class/group therapy setting for depression.  We were introduced to the Okinawan idea of a moai: “Moais are social support groups that form in order to provide varying support from social, financial, health, or spiritual interests.[1] Moai means “meeting for a common purpose” in Japanese and originated from the social support groups in Okinawa, Japan. The concept of Moais have gained contemporary attention due to the Blue Zone research popularized by Dan Buettner. According to research, Moais are considered one of the leading factors of the longevity of lifespan of the Okinawan people, making the region among the highest concentration of centenarians in the world”

            I’m going to leave this right here while I go off and add to my moai, or as I see it, the extended family who chooses each other.  Until next time, keep philosophizing!

The Process of Grief: Confronting the Inevitability of Death

In the Words of Marcus Aurelius

“Constantly reflect on how swiftly all that exists and is coming to be is swept past us and disappears from sight. For substance is like a river in perpetual flow, and its activities are ever changing, and its causes infinite in their variations, and hardly anything at all stands still; and ever at our side is the immeasurable span of the past and the yawning gulf of the future, into which all things vanish away. Then how is he not a fool who in the midst of all this is puffed up with pride, or tormented, or bewails his lot as though his troubles will endure for any great while?” (Meditations, 5.23)

This is something I’ve definitely had to work on over the years. Remembering something very simple: even though the people in my life come and go, and it saddens me greatly, I have no control over when death or some other circumstance takes a friend or family member. And as cliché as it sounds, death is really life’s natural conclusion. And death takes us all at some point, and then comes grief. Today is going to be a little different, rather than give you something quoted from the passages of Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius on how we should deal with grief, I’m just going to speak from a result of my own reflections on the matter, and hopefully they line up well enough with Stoicism to be considered such, and if not, I hope you find them useful anyway.

Grief Is Personal

Again, this might sound stupid, but every day you wake up remember that death is a natural part of life. You can no more stop death than you can control whether or not the sun rises. I, like a lot of people, have had a life in which a lot of people have passed away. Some of them were family members, and others very close friends. Each time one of these things happened, I felt the pain of loss very deeply. The thing about me is that I also have depression, and you’ll hear people tell you that grief and depression are different, and they’re right. But what people don’t often talk about is how grief can slide easily into depression for those of us who are well acquainted with it. Often, I started to feel like all of these people left me because I wasn’t loved, or that the world hated me, or when I was still religious that I’ve must’ve done something so egregious to displease God, that I was hated by supposedly the most benevolent being in the entire cosmos. Self-centered, right? That’s not a knock against people who experience these thoughts, I just admitted to having them myself. But did you notice anything? It’s all about your experience of the event.

See, because here’s the thing: we have people while we have them, and the whole point of Stoicism or any other philosophy, is to help us frame our lives in such a way that we can make reasoned choices that are better in some meaningful way. So while we have these treasured people in our lives, I think the Stoics would say to treasure them while they’re here, and to know that you will be okay when they’re gone. You will carry them with you in your memory. There’s another important point I want to bring up about that last bit. We carry them with us in our memory… We often hear people tell us when we are grieving, “person X wouldn’t want you moping around all day.” Usually, these kind of comments are unthinking and just something you’re supposed to say if you care. But really take a long look at what your loved one would want for you. Would they want you to be grieving for months on end? If they loved you, probably not. Would they want you to sequester yourself from the rest of the world? Again, probably not. So what would these people want from you, what do our loved ones want from us? The short answer is this: to go on living. Remember the things that our loved ones value about each of us, and continue to embody those. We have to continue forward. We honor their memory with each breath we take, and with each life we touch. So in a way, we are the ones keeping them alive in our hearts. When we fully consider what our loved one would want, we can then begin to be okay without them here. Hopefully that wasn’t too repetitive, but I think this hits where it needed to. Before I go, I want to share with you a post that I made while taking an online course on stoicism and Marcus Aurelius, on the topic of coping with loss and mortality.

Conclusion: Sharing One Final Thought

Here’s the final piece, as is: “The human soul does violence to itself above all when it becomes, so far as it can, an abscess and a sort of morbid outgrowth on the universe. For to set your mind against anything that happens is to set yourself apart from nature, which subsumes the nature of all other things.”

This is a very useful maxim, and one that I have found to be very true. When dealing with pain of any kind, physical or psychological (stemming from loss or otherwise) there is always a psychological component to it. I’ve had to fairly recent contrasting experiences with grief. One was three years ago, when an uncle I was very close to passed away. And the other was last year when my grandmother passed away.

In the first case, I had a very odd dream where I suppose my mind pieced together the various circumstances of my uncles health, and I had a dream where the doctors on his case were explaining to his wife (my aunt) that he was showing abnormal white blood cell counts and abnormal proteins in the blood and they thought that it might be some form of cancer. When I went to visit him just prior to his death, I told my aunt about the dream and she was surprised that I happened to dream essentially what the doctors had told her without having any direct contact. This made me feel as though I could’ve done something to prevent him from dying if I had said something sooner. And as a result, I allowed myself to descend into a spiral of guilt which led to depression. This is when I decided to seek therapy. After about 11 months, I managed to get my symptoms down to a subclinical level (somewhat humorously, it was due in large part to remembering Epictetus).

In the second instance, my grandma had fallen and as a consequence, had punctured her lung and she was on a respirator for a while. Her healing factor was diminished such that the hope of her making a full recovery was extremely slim and she would likely have been in a great deal of pain, and ultimately she decided on a comfortable death via morphine drip. The last night that she was alive she made a point to tell all of us that she loved us and that she wanted us to continue living our lives to the fullest and not to cry so much for her. In this case, I was reminded that all of our lives, including hers, are essentially on loan. Eventually, they all end. And I was grateful to have had the opportunity to witness her final moments being an act of love rather than some kind of agony. As a result, it left me with a lasting impression of the temporary nature of life, and how that could sometimes be an occasion for joy, or at the very least, a reminder that in death there is a kind of repose.

This lesson helped me internalize what’s going on in the first portion of the excerpt. It also helps me to reframe many of the losses of friends and loved ones that I’ve experienced over the years in a way that allowed me to bear them without an overwhelming feeling of sadness.

Thank you for listening. Until next time.

 

Friendship: Something to Treasure

Why Does Friendship Matter?

It seems like a simple question: why not have a friend? Life becomes fruitful and alive when you can share it with someone else. One of the greatest perks of having a true friend comes from the fact that both of you will attempt to reconcile if something like bad blood were to happen between the two of you. This accounts for misunderstandings and the everyday irritations that could happen in the course of a friendship; a friend will try to understand and offer advice as well as emotional support. Sometimes, emotional support might not be so obvious as “Hang in there” or “You can do it,” it may manifest as long conversations into the night (or day!), jokes, and dedicated loyalty. As our previous article shows, friendship is very important to us and for the Stoic Epictetus as well. For the purposes of this article, I’ll be using a different book to quote Epictetus, The Discourses as translated by Robert Dobbin.

 

What did Epictetus Think? It Was A Good Thing to Have

 

If you’ve been reading our articles, you have doubtless realized that Epictetus has provided for almost all our quoting; and that’s because he was a master diver into human psychology. Even friendship is not safe from the old philosopher, but he analyzes friendship not to tear it down, but to illuminate its purpose. As with all things in life, Epictetus’ view of friendship is austere, but, it does encapsulate what we often express when discussing the qualities of a good friend. Such as this quote:

“A bad person’s character cannot be trusted…Just ask whether they put their self-interest in externals or in moral choice. If it’s in externals, you cannot call them friends, any more than you can call them trustworthy, consistent, courageous or free.”

Self-interest is at the root of human nature, we often think about what will be in service of our goals. We do this all the time with objects that have utility like a screwdriver or a scalpel, but we don’t consider if we do this with people. In a work environment, the role of a manager involves using people to further the goal of the company as a whole; this makes sense. However, there are individuals who keep people around for nothing more than to use them for social approval and emotional validation and cruelty. For Epictetus, such a person is not even worthy to call human. He further elaborates:

“But if you hear of people who are sincere in identifying virtue with choice and the use of impressions, don’t bother with whether they are members of the same family, or friends who’ve run together a long time; knowing this is enough to say with confidence that they are friends, just as it’s enough to judge them fair and reliable. For where else is friendship found if not with fairness, reliability and respect for virtue only?”

Which is exactly what we find beautiful about the nature of having friends.

 

Eternal Allies, Friends Are

We have more examples of friendships in fiction, and this is the fun part for me personally because I find that discovering these eternal truths in fiction adds an extra layer to chew on than mere escapism. Harry Potter and his relationship with Ronald Weasly and Hermione Granger, is one of my favorite examples of friendship. They experience a multitude of obstacles and their friendship is in direct opposition to the anti-social Voldermort. Another example from my favorite fictional universe is Star Wars; we have Han Solo, Leia Organa and Luke Skywalker forging ahead a path of light against the anti-social forces of the Dark Side. Stories about heroism and cooperation are meant to show the power of social bonds in contrast to seeking power for its own sake or falling to lust or greed. Honestly, Captain Gimpy has been my good friend for 10 years now and we share many common interests and principles which form the core of our friendship. Even now, I can’t wait to tell him about the interesting fan theories that I’ve watched regarding the upcoming Star Wars movie!

 

Conclusion: From Friendship to Grief?

That does it for friendship, so what’s next? Well, we will be going into the hardships of grief and what the Stoics say about it. Grief is a touchy subject, but it is our belief that the fear of death is rooted in our avoidance of the subject in this country. It will be personal and it might hurt, but we hope it will comfort your anxieties.       

Friendship: the Two Parts of You

Friend: A Person To Be Cherished

Friendship is a central part of life, we are social creatures after all. What is friendship? We use the word friend so frequently but seldom do we really think about what it means to be a friend. Does it mean being nice to another person? Does the duration of the relationship matter? If I can borrow a little piece from Aristotle, a friend in the sense would be a single soul which dwells in two bodies. In a sense, the Stoics would agree. Maybe not to the fullest extent that Aristotle would’ve made the case, but a friend is certainly a person to be cherished.

Friendship Defined

I remember when one of my best friends passed away. We had known each other almost our entire lives since we were about six years old. And when he died, I went to the other people I was closest to, but eventually, my grief was labeled “too much.” I was told that “you are dwelling on the negative.” Or that I just needed to move on. While this may have been true to some extent, I felt in those moments that the people who call themselves friends somehow weren’t really being good friends. But at the time, I really couldn’t tell you why I felt that way. But I knew that I didn’t feel like I could trust them. I think we’ve all gone through a similar experience where something impactful happens to us, and the people we turn to show us that they have little time for what we have to say, or someone undermines our trust in some other way. So if that isn’t what friendship is, what is it? I went back to Aristotle’s definition for a long time, a single soul dwelling in two bodies. And I spent a lot of time thinking about it and flowery poetic metaphors. But that didn’t give me any closer to articulating what it was that I was missing.

I knew that loyalty mattered. I knew that how we treated one another mattered. That was one of the things that mattered most to the both of us from this particular person who was still alive. We treat each other like family, and for all intents and purposes, origins aside, we were family. As I moved forward with that definition, a real friendship started to emerge. People that I had known throughout high school, strangers that I would meet one night at a random open mic, friends made out of unlikely circumstance… There are a few of them, and while the number may be relatively small, the bonds are strong. There’s a pretty common quote that goes something like “friends are God’s way of apologizing to us for our  family.” But I tend to think of it this way, the strongest friendships are the family members we choose for ourselves. Seneca, in his third moral letter, writes:

“But if you are looking on anyone as a friend when you do not trust him as you trust yourself, you are making a grave mistake, and have failed to grasp sufficiently the full force of true friendship.”

I have found this to be true even by my own definition. People who share deep bonds, I have often thought that we should be able to share ourselves with them in a way that is different than how we interact with the rest of the world. There’s a deeper level of trust that is expressed by the things between friends. Seneca furthers this sentiment by saying:

“Think for a long time whether or not you should admit a given person to your friendship. But when you have decided to do so, welcome him heart and soul, speak as unreservedly as you would with yourself.”

Conclusion: What’s Next?

A lot of people use the term friend loosely, even during Seneca’s time that was pretty common practice. But for us deep thinkers, maybe it’s about time we think about what it really means to be a friend. And when we think about this, the things we find most important in friendship all very likely reveal themselves to us. So we can really be as unreserved with our friends as we are with ourselves. For some of us, myself included, that has also entailed learning to have a deep abiding trust in ourselves. There’s more to be said about stoicism and friendship so there will be another article on Thursday, by our other Socratic Buffoon. I hope you guys enjoyed it! Until next time!