JW, with his usual pragmatism, said with a tone of denial, of resistance or simply, of not being sure how to handle the fact that a few years from now, our friends will drift apart. I sadly had to concur with him that we would not be able to attend to each other’s ups and lows, of important events in our lives, anymore. But will it be that sad if when we meet again, all we will talk about is the past? Won’t we be able to talk about the present and the future, the mundane everyday conversations or meaningful conversations? I’m not sure. The analytical me told me that there are many different layers of friendships: based on common interests, similar experiences, shared values, and the deepest level, shared purpose.
Friends with common interests will be able to have fun with each other talking about sports, girls, movies, music – you know, all those first conversations we have with new friends. Similar experiences engage friends with common interest at another level where we bond through “hardships” and common achievements, like a team’s experience. We would experience each other’s strengths and weaknesses, when they are happy and when they are stressed. Shared values would then predict whether the friends can stay strong during the similar experiences. Conflicts sometimes arise and should our foundational values are too diverge, we stay away from investing our time and efforts being with these friends.
Shared values can form really deep friendships, yet we change, as we grow up and as we are physically too far from each other to have shared experiences or to fully be together when our values change. Our friendships are at risk at this stage, or put in JW’s words: our friendship base would shrink as we grow up. Shared purpose may be able to heal this gap. For example, we are concerned about each other’s happiness and dreams, or we share the same life purpose, broadly speaking, of improving ourselves, understanding the world, making impacts, and living with our human inevitable cycle of birth and death, etc. These purposes will bring themes to our friendships and will make us, as my idealism and optimism say, stay great friends. They have the potential to transcend geographic or temporal barrier to friendships. Yes, our friendship base will shrink but at any point in the future, should we meet each other, I hope our common sense of purposes will still bring us conversations, tears and smiles, just like the brightly innocent, sincere and happy smiles we have had for each other, when we were at Stanford, radiated in the sun.
