Sometimes you become friends with someone because of the shared emotional baggage you both carry. You’re collaborating in the same struggles. But you stay friends with people only when your friendship transcends the baggage and can transform the bullshit into real flesh and blood substance.

People’s problems are not important; but people are. You can show them how important *they* are sometimes only by showing them how goddamned unimportant their problems are. This isn’t about not caring or glossing over things. Totally the opposite. Can you ever help someone by lying to them or by withholding the Truth from them?

In Book III of the Discourses of Epictetus, the following parable is related:

“Beyond that I know not what more I can say to you; For if I say what I have in mind, I shall hurt your feelings, and you will leave, perhaps never to return; but if I do not say it, consider the sort of thing I shall be doing. Here you are coming to me to get some benefit, and I shall be bestowing no benefit at all; and you are coming to me as to a philosopher, and I shall be saying nothing to you as a philosopher. Besides, is it anything but cruel for me to leave you unreformed? If some time in the future you come to your senses, you will have good reason to blame me: “What did Epictetus observe in me,” you will say to yourself, “that, although he saw in me such a condition and coming to him in so disgraceful a state, he should let me be so and say never a word to me? Did he so completely despair of me? Was I not young? Was I not ready to listen to reason?”

In my own trials, I have found it of the utmost importance to realize that I have either sought out or at the very least accepted the nature of the relationships in which I find myself involved. So if they are not what you want them to be, why are you continuing to accept them as such? If you accept them in their negative state, what impetus will they ever develop to evolve? Which is not to say that you can or should ever change anyone else. But you have Free Will: you can accept or deny, stay or move on. But just remember: people are important and not their problems. Problems are like puzzles. They can be solved.

I realized something incredibly important last night while hanging out with my good friend Tim (another Tim, although I certainly do “hang out with” myself a lot). We tend to think of religious communities as being founded upon shared beliefs. This is bullshit. Religion is about shared values. Values are simply things that we value. I think this one weird thing is important. And so do you. We may even think it is important for varying reasons, but we both agree that it is important. What is a value though? A value is an ideal, abstract. As such, it needs to be “clothed in perceptible form” - to quote the Symbolist painters. They understood that a symbol is most useful for the expression of a value, of an ideal, because a symbol is the least restrictive of all human formats of communication. It doesn’t affix a static meaning: it becomes a container for value. Religion degrades when people sacrifice the underlying value for some particular belief attached to the vessel of its expression.

And I guess that ties back in some roundabout way to what I was saying about friends. When you’re really and truly friends with someone, it transcends the circumstances each of you were in when you first met and really bonded. Friendship is a shared recognition of value, a value each one sees not just in the other person, but in your relationship together: the value that comes out of the inherent greatness of two or more beings being brought together. Friendship therefore is an ideal, Platonic love, which requires perceptible forms for its proper expression. Just don’t cling to those forms when they’re no longer useful. That’s all I’m trying to say.