Delphic Maxim 105: Guard friendship
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
105. Guard friendship
Fun fact (well, fact): I am writing today’s maxim at an altitude of 32,000 feet. My partner James is sitting next to me as we fly to Vienna. In Vienna we’ll see my friend Josep, who I haven’t seen in three years. After that we’ll go to Prague, where I will see my friends Will and Miguel, and meet up with Chris and Justin. Then Chris, Justin, James and I will fly to Greece and Israel. Then James and I head to Istanbul to catch up with my friend Georgina who lives in Berlin. And after Istanbul, we head to Paris where I’ll have a drink with my friend Sonja.
Friendship is so good, and it follows us around the world — if we’re lucky enough.
There have been a whole bunch of maxims where I have pointed out that the ancients were absolutely obsessed with the idea of friendship. In On The Good Life, Cicero describes his meanderings with friends, and how important he thinks friendship is. Aristotle ranks it up there with the virtues as a vital feature of a life well-lived. Plato’s dialogues are often structured as long conversations between good friends — and Plato’s friendship with Socrates is one of the reasons we know so much about the great philosopher of Athens.
So today’s maxim is a nice, lovely no-brainer. It also happens to be one that I’m very happy to end the week on (and with which to start a holiday).
What does it mean to guard friendship? I think we can take a fairly open interpretation of the verb guard here: the point is that we want to protect our friendships, to make sure they last and are lasting. When I think about the things that give me the most joy in life, almost always they involve spending time with my friends doing one thing or another.
It’s also one of the reasons that I think it’s important to be forgiving, hugely forgiving, when friends screw up (if they do). Friendship is too valuable to burn on grudges and tiffs. I love my old friends and the longer a friendship lasts the stronger it becomes. This is actually something similar to the effect Nassim Taleb describes with ancient books: the older it is, the longer it will last (and the more likely that it is worth reading).
Guard new friendships as well, so that they become old ones. You never know how people come into your life, it’s such a serendipitous thing, but when you make new friends that just get you, they age into those solid, close old friendships. My friends Luke and Lisa are a perfect example of this: by chance we met these people walking our dogs, and now I can’t imagine my life without these two very good friends in it.
Some of these maxims are difficult to translate (the ones about marriage, religion), but some are super super easy. It’s almost like there’s nothing to write about because it’s so obvious. Guard your friendships — they’re one of the best things life has to offer.
