Mindful Friendship

I don’t have a lot of friends, I think this comes with age and having a family and a business and all of that.

Or maybe I am just not that likeable.

Let’s go with me being busy.

My wife is my best friend, I have a few others.

I was not a good friend for most of my life.

Everything was about me, and conversations were just a game of grab the ball and run the other direction, as Calvin and Hobbes so aptly describe it. I often viewed other people as a means to an end in creating an image or a persona for myself.

I thought of myself first, and everyone else was a distant second.

This doesn’t work in friendship, or in any relationship.

It’s self-absorbed and rude, and it feeds the illusion of the ego. The more that we do that, the more we suffer. The more we feed this separateness the more real it seems, and the further we are from reality.

Being mindful in friendship means maintaining an awareness of what the other person or people are saying, and what they need from us. It’s about allowing relationship to be actual relationship, a synthesis of what more-than-one person is experiencing instead of warping everything to fit what we want it to be.

Mindfulness means it’s not about us.