Simplicity is Stability

This year, I'm taking a class called AP Langage and Composition. According to my teacher, Mr. Norris, it's a "wildly-popular class in the world of AP." I can see why. Only two weeks into school it's obvious how helpful the ability to clearly dictate one's argument can be- especially when your life is one like mine.

Other than the improvement of writing skills, we're reading a lot of "classic"-type American novels, essays, articles, short stories, etc. Among these were a few chapter-long excerpts from Thoreau's Walden; the first is titled "Economy." For those of you who are not familiar with the guy's work, Walden is basically an account of Thoreau's 2-year experiment with solitude. He moved into a little cabin near the little lake named "Walden" and tried living out his bare-bones Transcendentalist lifestyle as best he could, stripping himself of all clutter which hinders us. The idea was that without unnecessary stuff- worries, responsibilities, schedules, money, goods, unnecessary food, etc.- he would be able to see what was truly important.

I am not a Transcendentalist. I find it fluffy and vague and kind of silly as a whole. But parts of a great number of philosophies have interesting concepts attached. Reading fluffy and vague and kind-of-silly ideas forces you to think about those ideas as if they should make sense. The product of this process is often a sort of personalized synthesis, which normally seems altogether more relevant to me. It is in this way that Thoreau, like Machiavelli, has made some superubermegatangents start brewing.

In one small part of one of those small excerpts from Walden, Thoreau discusses community and solitude, complaining about his personal irritation with the lack of cooperation between people, and what a pain it is to have to pursue some kind of harmony. Everything goes faster and smoother and more efficiently without company. When people cooperate, it's almost always "partial and superficial," and when it's not, it's "a harmony inaudible to men."

The ubermegatangent in me disagreed. Naturally, there's cooperation around us all the time, every day, and I doubt too many of us would dispute that: but what kinds of cooperation are they? If we do have harmony, are they in categories, like Thoreau's?

Within harmony, there are all the different kinds of love and courtesy. Romantic, familial, acquainted, formal, authoritative... the list goes on and on. But in this list is "friendship;" this where the tangent decided to camp out.

For the 10-or-what years I have been thinking about this, it has gradually become clearer and clearer that there are two very distinct, contrasting ways in which my peers and I pursue friendship. Two different worldview lenses, if you will. (If there are more than two, I notice these because they're prevalent.) It seems that each person has a natural tendency to one of them, but can drift between or shift from one side to the other, should they chose to do so.

The first is a nuclear view. A given example selects or is drawn into a very narrow, close friendship or small group of friends, where the members become each others' primary source of trust, community, association, and security among their peers. These people tend to feel a need to share everything of themselves with this nucleus, or an unwillingness to share personal stories or information outside of this group. Many people who hold this view are those who could readily identify their "best friend" or can count their "real friends" on one hand, regardless of their level of "peripheral" social activity. These "nuclei" can be very intimate, committed and provide a very personal guidance. It can help these people to grow closer together over a longer period of time, giving an opportunity to help each other in deeper ways than might be possible otherwise. (If you know what I'm talking about, think Reformed Theology: this view is like the P in TULIP.)

The second is what I might call the plum pudding view (just for kicks). Whether such a person is extroverted or more introverted, they have no boundaries to their list of friends; instead, different relationships are spread evenly across whatever number of acquaintances they have. There is little hierarchy in intimacy. They do not feel a need to make a "switch" from one friend to another if a friendship drifts apart or fails, because all their friends are equal sources of support in their lives. They may be just as exclusive, judgmental, prejudiced, etc, but they do not see intimacy as a thing to be admitted to or expelled from. (So this view like everyone else's view of preservation/apostasy, outside of Calvinism and the Baptists. Liking my analogies?)

I'll say now that since I was a little kid, I've gravitated towards the nuclear view. Sometimes I've had friends with the same view, and it suited us well, for the time being; other times, I haven't. Some of the greatest emotional devastation I have experienced, particularly a number of years ago, has been because I was unable to recognize this difference between myself and my friends, most of which didn't have the same "nuclear" view I did. Now, years later, I am slowly attempting to aim my drift towards the middle, between the "nuclear" and "plum pudding" perspectives. The closer I get, the lighter the pul, the less there is to worry about, and the simpler life becomes. Suave. It seems so much stabler that way.