Pile it high, please

"Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit." ~~Aristotle

In some more scholarly incarnation of myself, I fancied the work of Aristotle. I have a notebook scribbled full of quotes and notes from a class I took many moons ago. I pulled some of it out to write here because:

1. I need to get sleepy.
2. It reminded me of some recent conversations about friendship and the limited capacity we have for taking on new "intimates" in our lives.

It was always interesting to me that more than anything else Aristotle considered human relationships vital to universal knowledge. He devoted much of his teaching to understanding friendship and the soul.

In Ethics he defined three kinds of friendship:

• Friendship for pleasure
• Friendship for utility
• Friendship for good

Friendship for pleasure occurs when two people are drawn together not really because of who they are but because they have a common interest in an activity that they can pursue together. Their mutual participation in that activity enhances their individual pleasure in life.

These kinds of friendships might be the most frequent and easiest for me to establish. The "crush," if you will. For me, crushes have never been gender limited and are seldom sexual. They last only as long as they can hold my interest. They may be intense, but they are never
deep or connected.

Friendships for utility focus on what use the two can derive from each other--"What is in it for me?" Each party supplies something to the other on some very basic level. Someone might know something you need to know. Someone might have access to something you need to have.

I think we all have these types of friendships to some degree and they last as long as each has the ability to continue to meet the need of the other person or until the driving need shifts and becomes obsolete.

Friendships for good, however, are the most stable and perfect of the three types of friendship. These friendships come into being when two people engage in common activities for the sake of developing that which is good in the other. Pleasure and utility can reside in a friendship for good--they just don't sit in the front seat or get to hold the road map.

By the nature of our human selves, we can and do outgrow friendship types one and two many times in the course of a lifetime, but the soul takes root and grows forever in the soil of friendship type three.

Aristotle said, "Friendship is one soul living in two bodies." I suppose it requires attention, time and intimacy to develop one soul. And, such connections, as they should be, are precious and rare.