To know a truth well, one must have fought it out.
- Novalis
I will not recount heart’s skirmishes in which I’ve fought out the truths that follow. (As for the MindSpinner policy on such matters, see an early post entitled Dull Bits.) But here’s what I’ve worked out, and it needs to be written down not so much so because somebody needs to read it (i.e., you, since you happened here, as if I knew anything you don’t) but because writing it down is like claiming a small victory.
Love is the only wisdom given to us. There is no other. Love for all that is, love for another, love for self. There is honor, regard, awe, and endless gratitude in love. Love is not mere sentiment; love chooses, love acts. Love is not selfishness or desire or need. Love does not own another person’s dreams or attempt to dictate them.
Romantic love is intoxicating and sweetest of all, but unless it is founded on abiding friendship, it is a fleeting thing. It may indeed be Narcissus, infatuated with his own reflection in the pool, reaching into the water to embrace only weeds and mud.
Of friendship, Stephen Ambrose has written words I have long remembered:
Friendships are different from all other relationships. Unlike acquaintanceship, friendship is based on love. Unlike lovers and married couples, it is free of jealousy. Unlike children and parents, it knows neither criticism nor resentment. Friendship has no status in law. Business partnerships are based on a contract. So is marriage. Parents are bound by law. But friendships are freely entered into, freely given, and freely exercised. (From Comrades.)
Friendship creates a space of hospitality and welcome for another, a shelter of acceptance, a place to come and be, a home for the heart where one can always return, where the door will always be opened, the light will be on, the hearth will be warm, and there will be sustenance and a word of care. Friendship is gift.
One hard thing about a real gift is that it doesn’t imply an obligation on the part of another, even to receive it. Love has to suffer that, too. There is no other way. One would think that the easier thing would be to cease to love, to decline to extend a gift that may refused, opened or unopened, or ultimately dashed from our hands by mortality itself. But to cease to love is folly. It is emptiness. It is all the salt in the Dead Sea that renders those waters poison to drink. Willingness to suffer and to lose is therefore a part of love and of wisdom, for there cannot be love without risk of loss. Love deals pain as surely as it does joy. The pain and the joy twined together remind us that we are truly alive.
This is how Emily Dickinson closes a poem about friendship that abides:
And so, as kinsmen met a-night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.
I love these lines about the undying conversation friends have, and lovers, too, if they are friends foremost. The wisest people in the world are those who know the value of friendship above all and make their friendships a vital life’s work. That’s what I’ve decided forty-five years into the ever exquisite and sometimes excruciating adventure that life is.
Platitudes fall like pattering raindrops on the roofs of our minds, then flow into gutters we construct to carry them away. Truths, on the other hand, sear us like lightning that illuminates the heart of the storm. What is the difference between the platitude and the truth? Often, only the living we have done.