Intovert friendship from the Marginalian

 

An Introvert’s Field Guide to Friendship: Thoreau on the Challenges and Rewards of the Art of Connection

Marginalian editor, Maria Popova, says this:

You can glean a great deal about a person from the constellation of friends around the gravitational pull of their personhood. “Whatever our degree of friends may be, we come more under their influence than we are aware,” the trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell observed as she contemplated how we co-create each other and recreate ourselves in friendship. Her friend Ralph Waldo Emerson — whom she taught to look through a telescope — believed that all true friendship rests on two pillars. In his own life, he put the theory into practice in his friendship with his young protégé Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862) — a solitary and achingly introverted person himself, who thought deeply and passionately about the rewards and challenges of friendship

She quotes Thoreau:

The field where friends have met is consecrated forever. Man seeks friendship out of the desire to realize a home here… The friend is like wax in the rays that fall from our own hearts. My friend does not take my word for anything, but he takes me. He trusts me as I trust myself. We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship.

llustration by Maurice Sendak from a vintage ode to friendship by Janice May Udry

For me, in this time of my life, I have some really nice aquaintences, and a few deep friends. They all accept that I'm not a party gal any more! I like the image I learned from some internet or another saying "You are the average of 5 of your friends." I think of my friends, and feel just what that might mean to me.

BR

Shhh, Introvert hibernating!

Retired. So it's me a few pounds heavier, and about 8 years ago...never knowing what was in my future at that point.  At that time I was still just recuperating from thinking about how to please others all the time...which was my job.  An Activity Director for the last 7 years of my career, starting with Assisted Living facilities, then finally for an Independent Living Senior Apartment tower with over 200 units.

I could do the job, and I loved some of it.

But I'm naturally an introvert, and would spend most weekends in bed, as well as come home from work exhausted.  Someone hinted to me this last week that there's a need to train Activity Directors so all seniors receive good quality of life.  Not me, I'm not at all eager to return to work.  I'm having enough trouble just taking care of myself and the cats, and now my health, and sometimes making something or another in clay.  Right now that's on the back burner...waaay back.

I'm pretty sure people think of me as a self-centered somewhat bitchy person when I'm around a group of people.  Not true, but I just don't want to "put myself forward," as extroverts naturally do.

So even blogging is sometimes difficult, so please be patient with my need to hibernate these days!