Many of you have invented ways you hope you’ll earn love, friendship, loyalty.
But the truth is, neither of them can be earned, unless they have been a deal, an overt deal, to begin with.
Kindness doesn’t buy love… it may not even buy reciprocal kindness.
Giving, taking care of someone, caring for them or about them doesn’t buy you anything…
- When the chips are down, people who love you they will go to bat for you.
- “Purchased” people will leave and feel a stinge of sadness that the free lunch is over.
I have read on the internet that the way to find out if someone loves you is to pretend that you lost all your money…
Another great way is to pretend that you have cancer. Incurable.
Real friends, people who love you for you, not for what you do for them, will stay. The rest: good riddance.
I have a ton of people who say to me “I love you”
They mean: I love what you give me. If I can get it somewhere else, I’ll be out of here. or… as soon as I don’t need it or don’t want it: I am out of here.
My mother had one friend. When she died, she began the process of dying… she had a heart attack. A month later she was dead too.
Friendship is important.
I know nothing about friendship.
Friendship is, probably, rare. There are people who have me in their corner, but I have none.
If you still have time, see, test, if the people who think are friends are really friends.
Tai says: go back to childhood. Friendships that were born through “being in the trenches together” last, and are deep. I may have one friend, a woman I went to architecture school with, and we talk a few times a year on skype. She may be my friend.
I may expect too much from friendship. Maybe being a shoulder to cry on is friendship… I don’t know.
I don’t want a shoulder to cry on… or do I?
I have lived by a sentence: “It is hard to be silently brilliant. Lots of thoughts occur when you open your mouth.”
What the statement doesn’t say: who is listening and how they listen is really important.
Maybe that is the meaning of “a shoulder you can cry on”… a person who can listen to you so you can reinvent yourself, reinvent life… so in their listening you can get well if you are not well. Whole and complete.
