Are you a loner? Don't get out much? Believe your Twitter followers are your friends? Haven't seen another's house in months, or been out for a coffee with anyone other than your iPhone? Well here are 10 reasons why you need friends.
1. You are made for community: We are social beings. We have developed out of smaller groups and families to more complex societies. There is something incessantly social about the human being--it's in our DNA.
2. You can't make it alone: We need people in our lives--we can't walk this precarious earth alone. And only when we try do we find out just how darn tough it is.
3. It's no fun: Ever sat in front of a movie and desperately wanted to share it with someone else--even when enjoying the quiet? It's not fun without sharing the stuff we like with others.
4. Keep you real: We can get all puffed up and tell all sorts of lies to ourselves about how awesome or wretched we are. We can build sand castles in the sky or pits deep enough for us to fall into. Friends can lift us up when we've fallen down, and bring us down when we've left planet earth for our own illusory star.
5. Teach you stuff: We're only as smart as our community. We can be erudite scholars and researchers and thinkers, but a community of other beliefs and ideas and sources of research can make us sharper, smarter. Intelligence is so multi-faceted and diverse that there's always something new to learn from someone else.
6. It's just plain healthy: We are healthy to the extent that we're in community with others. It's hard to say why, but a good friend or set of friends can help us stay healthy, responsible, and better in touch with ourselves.
7. You have something to give: How can you shine without friends? How can you give without friends to give to? How can you take all your knowledge and experience and give it back to the world without friends to receive it? Everyone has something inside to give--a spark, a joy, a talent, a gift--and friends are the direct objects of those gifts. And when we give to them, we receive something special in return: joy.
8. Being lonely sucks: There is a difference between solitude and loneliness: in solitude, we draw energy and strength from being present to ourselves, our feelings, experiences, circumstances; however, when we are lonely, we feel alienated, despondent, and often without hope. Solitude is something we seek for wholeness; loneliness is something we fall into and wish we hadn't.
9. To be in touch with life: When we touch others, we touch life itself. When we welcome others into our lives, we have a chance to become more fully alive; to become healed, to find solidarity, to find people who have walked similar paths, or those we find ourselves on that present nothing but peril. We are better in touch with who we are as human beings. We are no longer estranged, no longer alone.
10. Solitude is better: When we have friends, when we are engaged in community, those moments of solitude, those moments we take to be away from others, become sweeter. While we are in those moments of solitude, we can be thankful for the community we will return to when, again, we are ready. We can be human and free in our solitude because of the strength we have garnered through our social interactions. We are not lonely, because we remain in community even in our solitude.
If you have slipped out of community, whether because of work, or school, or just life slipping by, I encourage you to re-enter. If you have lost touch with some friends, maybe this is a good time to re-connect with them. If you have left friends who were of poor influence, find the places where those of good influence would be, and enter that community. Our world is full of loneliness and despair, especially as it becomes more technologized. It's easier to hide behind our computer screens than to enter deeper into life. Be encouraged.
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