Core Value #2: Friendship

Last post was all about autonomy. Today, we’re moving on to friendship in this core values reflection series. 

In my office at school, there is a beautiful print featuring one of my favorite quotes. 

“We are all just walking each other home.” – Ram Dass. 

We’re all on a journey, walking a path, and it’s a special blessing when we get to walk awhile with another soul. That shared walk is friendship. 

Friendship: strong ties with family, friends, and co-workers or members of a certain community.

While sifting and sorting during my values sort, friendship won out over family, community, relationships, security, stability, loyalty, and more—because I believe it encompasses them all. Each is a facet of friendship. 

I believe a need for relationships and community is wired into us—and Maslow agrees. Love and belonging is one of humanity’s core needs, just after physiological and safety needs, before we start worrying about esteem or self-actualization. We need each other, and I honor that need. 

My sense of security, stability, and feelings of reciprocal loyalty grow naturally from solid relationships with people I love, the long-time kind, and at the same time that strong foundation allows me to stay open and accepting to any new travelers who might walk next to me for awhile. I love having friends I’ve known since childhood, friends with years of memories and connection between us, and enjoying the spark of brand new friendship with any special people life brings my way. 

This especially includes my co-workers. Because of my job, I get to meet some really lovely, kick-ass people. Public educators are a special breed of human. It doesn’t happen right away—sometimes it takes a long time, but I truly enjoy getting to know my colleagues as full humans, as friends, outside of just working together. 

Lastly, I care very deeply about infusing friendship into my family. More than anything else, I want to be friends with my husband. Honestly, being best friends has carried us through some rough seasons when other connections felt frayed. I want my kids to be lifelong friends, the same way I am with my siblings. And while I’m primarily their mom for now, there will come a time very soon when my kids don’t need me to parent them anymore—when we get there, I want to be their most reliable friend. That can’t be some dramatic switch at some point in the future. It starts now.

Same goes for my bigger family, except that I’m the grown-up kid these days 😆. While they’re still my mom and dad, I care about being friends with them. My brother and sister are two of my closest, longest friends. My aunts and uncles and cousins all feel like one big friend group with varying levels of closeness. I love it, and I’m so grateful for it. 

I see more friendship in my future.

Looking forward, I can see how intentionally remembering friendship as a core value and centering it more consistently in my life will create positive change for me—helping me along toward always becoming a better version of myself.

While I deeply value friendship on the inside, my life on the outside doesn’t always reflect this truth. 

I spend a lot of time alone in my head or default to task-completion mode when life feels full, rather than spending quality time with friends—and this needs to shift. I need to honor my values in practice by investing in people whose friendship lifts me up, calls me out, and helps me grow. This means real life time together in-person, texts or phone calls or Marco Polos in between, and me choosing to push my inner thoughts out through my mouth even when it’s hard or I’m tired. 

You’d think I would be good at this type of vulnerability (as a counselor, with what I choose to write, etc.), but I’m actually way more comfortable letting others be vulnerable while I stay quiet. Playing the quiet observer, holding space for others, and struggling to take up space myself. Slowly getting comfortable with showing up 1) consistently and 2) equally in my relationships is how friendship becomes not just something I cherish, but something that actively shapes who I am becoming. 

This is the work I’m committing to now, and it’s exactly the type I hoped might be illuminated by this project.

I’ll end with a longer C.S. Lewis reflection on friendship—one that’s long been close to my heart:

“In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reaction to a specifically Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him ‘to myself’ now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald. Hence true friendship is the least jealous of the loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, ‘Here comes one who will augment our loves.’ For in this love ‘to divide is not to take away’”