Simplicity 103: Persons
Chances are good that you, like me, periodically prune your list of acquaintances. I recently completed such an exercise when I bought a new pocket-size, address/phone book. The old one was crowded with names accumulated over several years. It was time to lighten the load, and I did by culling about 25 percent of the entries.
My bride and I usually perform a similar ritual around year-end. We update our home-address list by adding new names and subtracting old ones in conjunction with sending and receiving holiday greeting cards. Every year we find we no longer receive cards from some people; every year we, likewise, stop sending them to some people. "That's life" as Frank Sinatra put it in song. For those of us interested in simplifying our lives, an aggressive approach to such pruning is in order. While cutting back on the number of names in a list does not necessarily reduce the persons in one's life, it is a symbolic gesture with solid potential for influencing behavior. Pruning is a step in reducing one's overall noun count, and it is consistent with the basic formula introduced in Simplicity 101:
Simplicity
x Noun Count = 1000
Our Simplicity times our Noun Count always equals exactly One
Thousand. To raise our level of simplicity, we lower our noun
count. One of the three types of nouns that can be lowered is
persons.
We all laugh at the epigram: "Let's have a party and invite 300 of our closest friends" We know the impossibility of having so many. There aren't enough hours in the day because each relationship we pursue or maintain requires an investment of time and energy from our finite supply. At some point our portfolio of investments in individuals becomes too big to manage well. In short, we over-tax our available time and energy. In addition, as one's number of relationships creeps upwards, they often overlap and sometimes lead to conflict, further complicating matters. The presence of too many friends, bless them, can clutter our lives. Clutter is the antithesis of simplicity.
The total number of persons we encounter in our lives forms a continuum. It starts with a large, random collection of strangers who exist far from our thoughts. The continuum spirals inward to a tiny core of people near the center of our awareness. The core consists of "true" friends, true in the sense that they are familiar to us, we can share private thoughts with them, and there is an equality of spirit. "A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud," says Emerson.
Out a distance from the core, and funneling into it from time to time, is a reservoir of everyday friends. These are persons with whom we are in regular, pleasant contact by choice. How do we acquire everyday friends? Chances are they are persons with whom we discover common ground upon which to stand. There are a number of possibilities. Shared interests, current or historic, are one. For example, another person and I might become pals because we both like boats. Shared experiences are another possibility; perhaps the two of us attended the same school or attend the same church or were in the Coast Guard. Common likes or dislikes are another bonding agent; two people can feel the same about the President or local mayor. Proximity can also promote friendship; two of us can be neighbors who are comfortable with one another, or compatible work mates in some vocation or profession.
Everyday friendships require maintenance; without it they atrophy. Cumulatively, the maintenance can add up to a tidy sum. How many such friendships can you or I realistically sustain? I know one lady who endlessly laments her frantic schedule but feels compelled (it seems) to attend every wedding of every son or daughter of almost every person she has ever known, regardless of how far from home the event occurs. She is constantly in motion. This is her choice to make, of course, but the price she pays is that she has little space for her proclaimed other interests. As Hemingway phrased it, "Time is the least thing we have of."
Even farther from our cores are acquaintances, persons whom we have met and know casually. To some degree they constitute the supply line of future, everyday friends. At a minimum, they add variety to our lives, for better or worse. They also typically consume a modest amount of time and energy, particularly in social circumstances where communication and/or frivolity are the expected norms. Membership and participation in voluntary organizations can often extract a toll in this regard in that everyone is expected to be, well, friendly.
Finally, farthest from our cores are strangers. In urban settings they influence many aspects of daily life and may indeed dominate the scene. For example, strangers fill the freeways, ferries, warehouse stores, airports, and urban byways. Most of us maneuver to avoid direct contact, but indirect contact is inevitable, and it costs us energy, too. This is one reason why many of us "need a vacation" after we return home from one.
What causes individuals to spiral inward toward each other's cores? How does a stranger become an acquaintance; an acquaintance an everyday friend? Chance, necessity, and mutual effort all play a part. If this combination leads to expanding like-mindedness, friendship can ensue. Military boot camp is an extreme example of the process. Strangers are assembled and homogenized via some times harsh treatment that creates a memorable, common ground and certainly, like-mindedness-by design. The result is often lifetime bonds between participants. The grueling internships that aspiring physicians endure work in much the same way. The internship process has a lot to do with creating the fraternal order of medicine to which most physicians seem to belong.
What causes individuals to spiral outward, i.e., become less friendly with one another? Shrinking common ground and like-mindedness. As time passes for any of us, interests change, personalities unfold, new players come onto the scene, events generate barriers, new needs emerge and overshadow old ones, and so on. Spiraling in either direction, outward or inward, is complicated.
Where do relatives lie on the
continuum? Any given relative can be at any point-stranger to
true friend. Fate chooses our relatives; we choose our friends.
(J. Delille) Relatives typically entail an extra layer of investment
in pursuit of common ground and rapport.
So where does this leave us on the sensitive topic of the number
of persons in our lives? For those of us on the simplification
quest, we can make headway by concentrating our attention on
true friends. The number of persons at the core is small. As
Henry Adams put it: "One friend in a lifetime is much;
two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain
parallelism of life, a community of thought."
Copyright © 1999, 2003
by Steven C. Brandt
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