*Sighs happily*
I've been reading C.S. Lewis's "The Four Loves". It's very good - he knows just
how to nail down the nuances of different types of love and ways of loving. I felt quite strange reading the chapter on friendship though, as nearly all my closest friends (or the people who were my closest friends, anyway) are so far away. I found it intriguing to note that he remarks how Friendship has to be about something - a shared enthusiasm, religion, interest, purpose. "That is why the pathetic person who just wants Friends can never make any." I felt kind of bad. I've been trying very hard to be friends with my xolleagues on my team for the past three months and not made much headway, to be honest. But Lewis makes the distinction between companionship - being in a 'club' - is different from being friends. The idea being that two or more friends discover a particular similarity between their thinking, and step up from being mere companions to being friends. This was pretty well illustrated when I joined Dougsoc - I'm very fond of many of its members, but my closest friends in the group are a little group that arose out of it - what, at the time, we nicknamed "TakeawaySoc" because of our shared takeaways and conversation. The weird thing is we seemed to discover we had a lot in common in the course of these meetings, like the time James quoted something from the first Discworld computer game and we all joined in...
When I thought about this this morning, I realised that I should be a good colleague... I should be friendly, join the chat over coffee and all those kinds of things... But not feel guilty if we aren't 'Friends' the way C.S. Lewis defines the term. It doesn't matter if we don't have that much in common. We should be nice to each other, but if we're not friends there's no shame in it. And I realised that if you want to make friends, it's better, rather than trying pathetically to get friends, to just be yourself. You'll find there are others like you - I discovered this at university... And it means that if I'm not friends with someone it doesn't mean that there's something wrong with them - or me. It just means that we're different - we haven't found that common ground yet that friends have.
So yeah, I'm going to be happy to be me, I'm going to talk to people and be friendly to them, I'll take an interest in people's lives... But I won't mind if we're not "Friends". I'll just cherish the friends I do have, and be happy to have them :)
Yesterday, Nick, the other placement student in our office, made a comment about work we're both doing that sent me into a panic. He seemed to have been doing it differently to me. Specifically, he was doing more of it. Everyone else had gone home, and I didn't have time to check if I'd been doing the wrong thing. So I became rather worried. And a bit annoyed, since I was only doing what Liz had told me to do. And I got all worried about it even though I'd been thinking about all the things I worried so much about that turned out to be silly. I remembered Music GCSE and how despite doing twelve GCSEs and being predicted As in eleven of them, that one D really really bothered me. Someone should have told me that a good musician, whilst she may be able to perform without error, compose effortlessly, discern notes instantly, and tell you everything from Bach to Bjork, first of all enjoys it. This actually holds true of every academic subject, particularly as one gets older. The trouble is, many teachers - curiously enough, in my memory they were all arts teachers and sports teachers - didn't seem to realise that their pupils would do a lot better if they knew that a subject or activity could be enjoyed.
...Still, despite all my sensible thoughts, I was worried, and convinced that come the morning I was going to look like a complete idiot - even when Matthew suggested that Nick might be the one doing it wrong. In the morning, I felt so fed up with life and work and everything, and of being a worrier, and of being useless, that I had to give myself a dose of Maya Angelou to give myself enough nerve to get out of bed. Which is good, since the collected poems of Maya Angelou were on the floor by my bed. I read "Still I rise" and "Life doesn't frighten me at all" and felt a bit better. I got to work, and noted that Agi (a Hungarian Harry Potter fan) had sent me an e-mail full of people who God used despite their shortcomings, and with thoughts like "When you worry, you didn't pray enough." Haha - who says there isn't a God? :)
So yeah, I talked to Liz, actually I haven't been doing it wrong, I'm not an idiot and I booked tickets for the Pirates of Penzance. Yay!
Random word for today: mamelon
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