So. I realize this list is ridiculous. Ridiculous in that I'm basically just regurgitating a bunch of cliched life lessons. Ridiculous in that I managed to reduce such a powerful experience down to these platitudes. But you know, the most ridiculous part of it all is that it took losing a friend for me to really understand these simple truths:
1. Love infinitely. Love ruthlessly.
Give love richly, as if you'll never, ever run out. Cradling it safely in my arms and doling it out only on special occasions as if it were a prized possession got me nowhere. This seems obvious. But one fateful day you might also be confronted with the overwhelming reality that you had the capacity for more, yet you hoarded the love you could have gifted to others as a false love for yourself instead--an unnecessary barricade of pride--because you thought the supply of love in this godforsaken world was finite. Because you didn't want to escape the comfort (read: confines) of your own narcissistic self-preservation.
...and it will crush you.
Safe? Safe is a good word for high-schoolers. And superficial, surface-level friendships of convenience. But safe is not a good word to fall back on when the big, the bad, and the ugly rear their heads. Ironically enough, safe won't save you when the going really gets rough. Safe will abandon you, betray you...only to reveal the fleeting insignificance in your relationships and the dooming frailties of your heart.
So empty yourself daily. Take risks daily. Because God's infinite pours of grace and wisdom will refill you. Learn to dwell in the uncomfortable zone. Tell them you adore them. That you're thinking of them. That you'd do anything to save them from their throes. Even if you can't. Even if two years later -- after they're taken away from you and after it's too late -- you find yourself point blank with the harsh reality that you couldn't possibly have done anything to save them.
2. Pray together.
Good friends are earthen vessels: they are the handiwork of the potter's hands, they have the capacity to hold a lot of good things for you (or become cesspools of muck if untended to...but that part goes without saying), and most importantly, they can turn back into dust at any whim. To pray together in good faith means to mourn together, to dream together, to fill voids together, to face the good, the bad, and the ugly together, to abound with hope together...and to cling to a life-giving truth in a dying world together.
3. Never, ever, ever be lukewarm.
Lukewarm people scare me now. Their subdued enthusiasm, their bent on maintaining neutrality, their false sense of contentment...all sacrifice truth and the blasé attitude is often just a lack of empathy brought on by blinding self-interest. Cold people are insecure people who project their crippling fears and unconscious deficits in self-esteem onto you. Well-known fact. But lukewarm people take those same fears and deficits to another level with their denial of meaningfulness (our raison d'être). This isn't wrong as we're all entitled to our own unique experiences--but if it's meaningful relationships that you're after, the day you allow yourself to be a lukewarm person should be the day you breathe your last dying breath. When you'll have no choice because your body will literally go cold.
4. Be tenderhearted. Be vulnerable.
...which brings me to the next point: say every warm thing you need to say, want to say, and feel compelled to say. Those times when you withheld genuine compliments or words of kindness or concern because you didn't want to seem sycophantic, let them roll off your tongue like thick molasses. Let it hang in the air, even if it makes you feel awkward or oversolicitious. There really is no time to waste on these follies. Rejection is terrifying, yes, but remorse is worse.
5. Wrestle with the ugly.
If you want your friendship to last, you have to be willing to allow your friend to a hold a mirror up to you. For the longest time, this was too scary for me because I didn't want to confront my fear that I wouldn't like what I saw. And I didn't have the guts to do it to others. But the good friend sits with you and shows you the beautiful, the scarred, the lovely. The good friend helps you wrestle with not just the evils around us, but the devils within us. What's more is this: I realized that if you're lucky enough to even have one person in your life who can mimic God's grace and do this for you with unconditional patience, you really can't ask for more. If you have one, go hug this person right now because some people don't get to have this experience...and it literally kills them.
6. Forgiveness is salve for the soul.
Work every kink out in the open, forgive others' selfish inroads, and relentlessly seek forgiveness for your own slip-ups. I learned the hard way that the second secretive thoughts begin to simmer below the surface, the friendship develops a rotten subterranean layer that neither of you will want to dig up later. And little did I know--what seems like just a silly little release of emotion (a head game, even) is actually a highly effective problem-solving solution with measurable results. My only regret is that it came a day too late in the case of my friend and, rather fittingly, I had a hard time forgiving myself for it. But the important thing is that forgiveness did eventually come to liberate...as he always does when you invite him in.
rip ysl ♥
