I’ve started climbing (again). This means twice a week I pull on tiny shoes that hurt my feet and try and go up, always go up, unless the way is actually sideaways and down and then up.
I started climbing (again) because a friend started climbing. This friend is one of the friends I do the most things with, and when he started climbing I was at first unmoved. I’d done climbing, my thinking went, and I’d put it behind me the way the Bible tells you to. What would more climbing bring to my life?
But then it became clear that climbing was the most thing this friend would do. Which meant that if I wanted to see this friend, I’d have to get back into climbing. Of course, I could have not done this. But also of course, I was the owner of a pair of climbing shoes. What was I, the owner of a pair of climbing shoes, doing not climbing?
So I tried climbing again. And it was… ok. It was ok.
Then I didn’t climb.
The summer happened, we went to festivals, and festivals were another thing I started doing because this friend was doing it. But this time our paths crossed only a little bit, and most of the time there were other friends to festival with, including new friends who only came over for the festivals. A thing had become other things.
After festivals I found myself once again at a climbing gym, and this time something clicked. I pulled on the tiny shoes and went up the wall and a thing went yes inside me. Yes, it said. I did another climb and again it said yes. YES. I thought about all the times someone had asked me to do something and I’d said no. I probably had good reasons to say no. I probably had every reason. All the reasons.
And here I was, feet planted in awkward poses, arms crying out for release, saying yes. One definition of a friend could be “person who gets you saying yes.”
“You don’t need friends, you need people.”
The wonderful Rosie Spinks asked her readers how they were building villages in their own lives. It reminded me of something I wrote five years ago (in the sense that it brought it to mind, not that I was nearly as insightful) about “emotional socialism”.
To quote myself:
A few years ago the scales of my life tipped a bit away from me. I needed a lot more from other people than I could give to them. S and C, a couple of friends who are also a couple, must have sensed this, and made a noticeable effort to reach out to me more. I bumped into them once around Broadway Market and they spent the rest of the evening listening to me ramble on about god knows what. For a few nights I stayed in their home.
My life is very full right now. For the people who need it, I try and tilt the scales back their way. That might mean more of my effort, or time, or patience. It might mean doing less at them. I practice something I call (please forgive me, I’m sorry) low impact friendship. It’s based on the idea of low impact camping (oh god why), where you aim to leave a site exactly as you found it.
I’ve made this the operating principle of my life. Sometimes I fail. I fail in ways so banal—I was tired, annoyed, frustrated, hungry—I wonder how I have any friends at all. Everyone thinks this way, right? Everyone thinks, I’ve failed my friends in such consistent and predictable ways they must surely be around me in fulfilment of some lost bet.
Right?
Boring Friends by Lydia Davis
We know only four boring people. The rest of our friends we find very interesting. However, most of the friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle, with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any moment, we feel, they may become too interesting for us, or we too interesting for them.
As a certain person is doing a Nazi salute in front of millions, I think about community. As the queer group at work wonders aloud if we’ll be let go for being politically problematic, I think about belonging.
Something I’ve started boring strangers with is my theory around retirement. Want to hear it? Ok.
So retirement seems scary to most people because they imagine, at best, they’ll be entering it with one other person, and maybe with just one person (themselves). Which is understandably worrisome. And it’s very profitable to play on those fears, which is why messaging around it is so prevalent. They can mostly be summarized as, “Don’t get old and poor!”
And my theory, or maybe just question, is thus: what if you weren’t alone?
Or maybe more specifically, what if there wasn’t the expectation that we’d enter our elder years needing to solely support ourselves. Friends band together to accomplish all kinds of things. Why not a secure way to grow old?
The more I think about this the more I become convinced it’s the way forward. Rally the troops with collective goals. I don’t have any practical suggestions about how this might work, but I feel like it would.
What brings you to Elsinor?
I used to keep a running tally of people I could hang out with, and when I got overwhelmed (which was often) I’d play it over in my mind.1 Sometimes the list was a couple people long. Once it was exactly one person.
Occasionally I’d surprise myself and discover a person I’d overlooked, sitting in the wings. And even if I was unlikely to call them, their mere existence was enough to push me out of whatever anxiety-fueled funk I’d found myself in.
At some point this felt too fragile, and it was probably around the same time I decided that Leonard Cohen poetry, the movie Before Sunrise, and the Cowboy Junkies cover of “Sweet Jane” should form the entirety of my personality and identity. When Chuck Klosterman wrote this in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs*, he was writing about me:
The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no “normal,” because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously. You can’t compare your relationship with the playful couple who lives next door, because they’re probably modeling themselves after Chandler Bing and Monica Geller. Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake.
It says a lot about how we conceptualize our place in the world that a network of friends felt less secure than a single point of relational failure. I was willing to pile all my hopes and fears onto one person like elephants stacked on a stool, with the clearly broken idea that if I just loved fully and completely (and madly) enough, it would work. It had to work. What was the point of being a Literature major if hyper-focusing affection wasn’t the answer?
Two divorces later and I think I can say this strategy didn’t pay off. But this isn’t a secret. There’s a wealth of thought on not making your primary partner the sole source of anything in your life (with a few exceptions that I’m not going to delve into…). Divorce rates are up, marriage rates are down. The whole enterprise feels like it’s spinning on its axis, ready to tumble.
And yet, when I talk to people (small sample size alert) this still feels like the general idea: find a person and start doing more things with them, less things with everyone else. This coincides with what feels like a rise in “being glad not to have to go out/getting to stay at home”, something COVID seems to have unlocked as a general vibe. Not being invited to things as a love language, etc.
When I look at this next to “loneliness is a rising epidemic/cause of death”, at least one of my eyebrows goes up. Being around people takes energy. Being friendly towards people takes a metric fuckton of energy, energy that, despite appearances, I don’t normally have in high reserve, and I have holding tanks expressly for that purpose.
And then (stay with me here) when I think about the rise of fascism and the next four years and how, undeniably, community-building and support is one of the most effective responses to this, and how when you’re glad not to see other people you’re probably not also warmly esconsced in a safe group of people, both my eyebrows shoot up out of my head and I pass out for a bit.
The problem, in my very humble opinion, is how difficult it feels to gather with people you don’t know, how difficult it feels AND is. Third spaces are all commercialized. Churches are problematic for a host of reasons and also require, generally, an adoption of faith (or the appearance of such). Like doing creative work, gathering in community feels best when we reduce the friction around it.
It’s not surprising to me then that climbing is one of the biggest growth sports in the world. You do it around other people, all trying to do the same thing, in a big open space not unlike a cathedral. There are rituals to learn and steps to master, and yet the activity is not competitive, even when it’s called a competition. The most common sight at a climbing gym is people who don’t know each other sharing notes and ideas for how to get up a damn wall.
This is why conservatives are always going after libraries. It’s not because they hate reading and fear knowledge.2 It’s because libraries, one of our greatest inventions, are free gathering spaces without religious or political affiliation. Libraries closing are the canary in the coal mine, and it’s probably already too late for that bird and everyone relying on it.
And this is why I still love pubs. Yes, they’re commercial enterprises, but you can go to any pub and sit there for 6 hours nursing a single drink. Heck, you can go to a pub and not order anything and chances are near-zero anyone will comment on it. To the extent many pubs have book shelves and board games, they’ve arguably become as important as libraries.
Sitting in solidarity with strangers
About a year ago M. got me a rug tufting course, which is how I found myself holding a very dangerous needle gun in a room with 8 strangers. We’d been listening to our very patient instructor go over all the ways we could mess up, before being released to mess up in our own unique ways.
People fetched each other coffee and passed round cookies. Once the mood settled a bit there were jokes and puns and gentle ribbing (“that’s an interesting way to draw a flower”). Most of all there were compliments, the kind you give when you don’t want anything from the other person and know you’ll probably never see them again.
Eventually a quiet working rhythm fell on the group, only the sound of our guns and the occasional gentle curse. How unusual is it to be quiet around people you don’t know, without the mediation of books or music?
None of the attendees knew each other from before. I don’t know if any have seen each other since. But for three hours on a Tuesday night, we looked and acted (and were) like a group of friends.
In the beginning of our relationship M. made it very clear I could not and should not make her my talisman against the void. She didn’t do this in a dramatic way, just by not being around and not living with me and saying no to things she didn’t want to do. At first this made me wonder if she liked me at all.
Eventually, as I acclimated to her ways, and my English major heart stopped bucking against it, I gained a lens through which to view the other people in my life. Who the hell were these people, and why were they here? What did I need and want from them, and what could I even have? And who was I to them?
It was a lot of fun and not at all humbling or destabilizing to think through these things.
I started (and eventually abandoned) making a list of everyone I knew. And I mean everyone, placing them into two categories: Friends and Something Else. I stopped when I couldn’t easily, instinctively place someone in one or the other.
The tendency here would be to think about the Friends as something more than the Something Else, but that doesn’t track at all for me. Some of my most meaningful connections are with people I wouldn’t feel certain are my friends.
Quite a few people replied to this travel post with some form of, “I didn’t know you and Craig Mod were friends!” I met Craig 15 years ago, have had lunch with him twice, and back his work through a membership program. I don’t think we’re friends, and I don’t think Craig would mind me saying that. But over the last decade few people have had a greater impact on how I live my life vis à vis my hobbies and approach to travel.
I have friends I’ve not seen for years and years, with whom I have almost no contact, and who don’t really influence my life in any distinct way (nor I theirs). And yet I wouldn’t hesitate to call them a friend.
I think friendship, much more than love, is a feeling.
Someone either feels like a friend or they don’t. And people don’t have to feel like friends to be important or meaningful to you. Like libraries, they can be safe spaces without affiliation, providing a room to learn and grow, around which you can flow as needed, and they you.
Extra reading
NY Times: When Your Greatest Romance Is a Friendship
Rosie Spinks’ newsletter, What Do We Do Now That We’re Here
This is such a small, sad memory but also one I hold onto and protect.
They 100% do but that’s not why.
Always fill my head with good thoughts Thom 🤲