How does your garden grow?

I promised a post on friendship, using Aristotle's philosophy as my guide.  Friendship for me has been a process of learning my own boundaries.  I am a house, with many rooms, and a large yard.  The house is reserved for those that i allow into the deepest parts of my heart.  To them I am transparent, they can come and go because I trust them to honor me.  My yard started out unfenced, allowing anyone in.  Unfortunately my garden got trampled by visitors that didn't know how to respect me, and the flowers in my heart were broken and withered so that I didn't have anything beautiful to give to those that DID respect me.  I had nothing to bring inside.  (This blog totally explains the internal struggle I face, In learning about my personality preferences I began to learn why I did the things I did.) So I began to wonder, what IS friendship?  How can I be kind to others if I don't let them in?  How can I give something beautiful to someone that needs it, and yet keep them out of my garden?  In my quest I found many things but the most helpful was this, Aristotle's view on friendship.  He basically states that there are 3 types of friendships, friendships of: Pleasure, Utility, and Virtue.

Friendships of Pleasure: Friends with whom you partake in vices, and/or fun activities.  These friendships are shallow, though may seem deeper than they are because you have "fun times" together.

Friendships of Utility: Friends you use to benefit, and also they benefit from you.  These friendships are based on need, and are obviously shallow.  Once one of you ceases benefiting from the other the friendship is over.

Friendships of Virtue: These are deep lasting friendships.  These are friends whom share your moral compass, your vision of the world, and your values.  These are friends that support you and what you stand for.

Just looking at friendship in these categories opened my eyes.  I realized that I wanted to keep friends, other than friends of virtue to a minimum while I constructed my personal definition of "Virtue".  Friends of Virtue would respect my garden.  So I decided to put a fence around my garden... not a privacy fence, a picket fence.  I would share my flowers with friends of Utility and friends of Pleasure, I would reach over the fence to them... but only those that respected the garden would be invited in.  I had to look back at how these categories shifted from college onward to understand how and where to build this fence, how to use the fence etc.

symbols don't represent a literal number of friends, but rather the idea of the percentage of time I spent with each category of friends.

18-22 (At ISU)
Pleasure friends (for going to parties mostly)**********************************************
Friends of Utility (study/running partners)     ***********************************
Friends of Virtue                                         *********

22-28 (Had 2 kids started working)
Friends of Pleasure (partys/BBQs/running Partners) ##########################
Friends of Utility (babysitting/running partners)        ##################
Friends of Virtue (other parents)                              ######

28-32 (transition from Civilian to Army)
Friends of Pleasure (Army peeps/BBQs/Running Partners)#########################
Friends of Utility (babysitting/Running Partners)                 ######################
Friends of Virtue (like minded parents)                               #######

33-34 (after my search)
Friends of Pleasure (Running partners/BBQs)                           ***********
Friends of Utility (babysitting/house/car help)                            ***
Friends of Virtue (as defined, even if it's only family)                 ******************************

You see, it now seems like a waste of energy and resources to socialize with those that aren't friends of virtue.  I could put those resources to better use helping others, and working to LIVE my values.  I believe that as I find more friends of Virtue, I will find that my friends of Utility and Pleasure will also be my friends of Virtue, and my "lines" will be close to even.  At that time I will have a garden full of flowers to pass out to those that are in great need of something beautiful.  Until then I've put up a wall that has, "UNDER-CONSTRUCTION OPENING SOON" spray painted on it while I replenish and reconstruct my garden.

Untitled

Come to me
Stand on the porch of my heart the
light burning to draw
you in leaving me no
choice in welcoming you.  Squeeze you
between my arms.  Trying not
to let you touch me. Your clang-kity clangk
monologue makes
it hard to
like the you I see in you.    I lose
myself to the buzzing
filament to survive it.  The judge holding
court inside of
me throws down the gavel "contempt!" snapping me back to you.  I spread
a generous smile, like a white flag between myselves, the one
that wants to hate you because
you deserve it with all
that ugliness inside of you, and
the one that wants
to love you because you need it, and I know
I'm ugly too.  And so I let you whir chaotically on my porch
but I won't invite you in.  And you feel comforted and accepted because you
are.  I compulsively love you, and can't wait
for you to leave so I can stop.  So I can go back inside out of your darkness,
Inside where the people capable of loving me, the few
I've invited in,
wait.

**as usual I hate this poem, as I hate all my poems when I first write them.  And I hope that those I've let in know who they are: Lisa, Casey, Christine, Laura, my family... among others.

10 ways to Pay it Forward.

Ten things we can to do to Pay it forward...

1.) If you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all.  In all honestly, no one cares to hear you be negative.

2.) Smile and Say "Hello" to everyone you meet today.

3.) Take the time to listen to strangers stories.  Some people desperately need to unburden themselves from their load, and you may be the only person they have to talk to, so be a good listener.  Sometimes it can really test your patience, but it is an important thing for us to do.  Taking the time to be invested in humanity is never a waste of time.

4.) When someone drops something, or many things, help them pick it up.

5.) Tell your mail carrier, newspaper boy, etc.  "Thank you"

6.) Give genuine compliments... even to family members.  I think it's sometimes easier to give strangers compliments than family.  I think this one is CRUCIAL to do with our kids.  We get so busy telling them what not to do, and what they need to do better that we forget to tell them what they do well, and what we appreciate about them.

7.) Make a gratitude list.  While this is something you do for yourself, make a list of what you have to be grateful for and everyone you encounter will benefit from your improved mood.  Not to mention that when we are focused on what WE HAVE, we aren't focused on what don't have nor do we envy what others DO HAVE.

8.) Be a friend, to everyone.  I'm not saying to bring everyone home.  I am talking about when you are outside of your house.  So often we enter into the world defensively, seeing others as our enemy, and we aren't even aware of our attitude.  Start seeing those around you as a friend, and you will be nicer to everyone.  Perhaps everyone will be nicer to you.

9.) Be GREEN.  yep, being good to the Earth is good for everyone.

10.) Be good to yourself.  If you can't love yourself, you can't love anyone else.

It takes a lot of courage to get started on any of these, because you could easily be met with grumpiness. Just remember, "we must be the change we want to see in the world" Ghandi (of course!)

Ghandi

Whoa, 3 entries in one day!  Holy smokes!  My husband and sons are working on a construction project and I actually have some real time to dump my thoughts!  I have a thing for Ghandi.  I have mentioned it before on this blog.  One of my favorite quotes on Christianity comes from him, " I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."  I think I love this quote because I can totally identify with it.  In a previous post I mentioned rejecting people that didn't accept my values.  There could be some self-identified Christians in that group.  It is important to note that in my vernacular, "reject" is NOT synonymous with "condemn".  I simply mean that I won't share my private time with them, but I will still show them love as best I can.


I think one of my stumbling blocks with finally owning my faith was that I felt I wasn't perfect enough to be Christian on the one hand, and I knew too many Christians that were flat out jerks that told me I wasn't good enough, or living righteously enough on the other.  Because of this I felt unworthy of Christ, like an ugly duckling and I my feelings were only being reinforced by people that should've been accepting and supporting me.  Talk about confusing.  I didn't and don't want to be associated with people that were and are so mean.  I want to be careful to not morph, accidentally, into a self-righteous jerk.  To prevent this I will be selective in who I let "into my head".


On the other hand I have known many people that don't yet know what they believe, or don't believe that Jesus is Christ, or don't believe in God for that matter.  I will always keep these people in my life, so long as they continue to accept me.  Why?  Because they live like Christ even if they don't share my faith in him.  I would rather have a friend that accepts me, and lives a life style in keeping  with my own, that will encourage me even if they don't agree with me.  They will rejuvenate me and enrich my life more than a self-identified Christian trying to pick, "a log out of their neighbors eye".  Even if they don't want to admit it, these friends of mine are more Christ like than the droves of Christians that actually drove me from Christ.


I have also been lucky enough to have plenty of Christian Friends that have given me strength to own my faith.  Friends that don't just have a bumper sticker relationship with Christianity, but they actually live the life a Christian is called to live.  Without those types of friends I would not be able to write this blog at all.  But, it's those friendships in which we disagree on fundamentals and yet can still get support, that Christ's love, as Ghandi would see it, is embodied.  So in short, faith Christ isn't my determining factor in who to include in my life, and my children's lives, but life styl, and willingness to support my faith in Christ is.  If one looks outwardly for the truth, and inward to judge we will most likely get along.  No one is perfect, most definitely not me.  I have chosen to live a life-style that actively rejects what the world embraces, and will surround myself with people who do the same.  You don't have to be a Christian to do that, but I need strength from Christ to become better than who I am, and to weather the criticism of the world that I am actively rejecting.  Why we are doing it may be the core difference in our values, and yet matters least in how we treat one another.  Behaviors, not beliefs is what matters most to me.


Religion, Spirituality, is a journey EACH ONE OF US takes.  We all seek answers to the same questions.  Some of us actively seek out answers, reading and researching for answers.  I, like Lee Strobel, took the journey and came to one conclusion.  Other's take the journey and come to yet another conclusion.  Some keep the journey locked within themselves never looking openly for answers, and never finding them.  No matter what another human's journey is, it is their's and not mine.  Who am I to tell them what they should do, where they should go.  It is simply my job to love them, and most of the time I fail them.  My job is to judge inward, not outward, so that I might love them better.  Really none of us knows (intellectually) the truth about much of anything.  Faith is something you can't know intellectually at all anyway.  It is something you live.  The rest of it is just a bramble of formalities many people get caught up in.  


I will discuss Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics in a different post.  Reading his outlook on friendship and virtue really helped me navigate my way through this conundrum.