Who Are Your Friends?
“Teaching my classes, I started to notice during the breaks that there was so much warmth between people who often had very little in common. They had just engaged in a fairly passionate and intimate kind of play with each other, and the connections between them happened so quickly, and they developed such a collective fondness for each other. But this fondness lacked the traits we normally associate with adult friendship. They didn’t know that much about each other. They didn’t know what was going on in each other’s lives. But they felt a strong and genuine closeness. They were happy to see each other. And I started to think, Oh-friends are the people you play with. That seemed like a pretty good definition of friendship to me, and I was satisfied with it.
Then, about five years ago, a friend of mine moved here from Kelowna, British Columbia. She said, You know, in Toronto, friendships are all based around talking. What you do with your friends is you go out for coffee or drinks, or you go to their apartment and you talk about stuff. In Kelowna, what you do with your friends is go swimming. It seemed really beautiful to me that in Kelowna your friends might just be these people who liked floating around in the water with you- that the people floating near you are your friends.”
(Another excerpt from The Chairs are Where the People Go)
