What is a friend worth to you? A southern paradox…

I just got an email from a friend who I have not talked to in a very long time. He just so happens to email a list of friends with a sporadic update on how he is doing every now and then. He is very open about everything and anything in his life, but I was somewhat dismayed to find this message written in a very downtrodden tone. He mentioned that he was seeking counseling and that “I find myself restless and groveling in darkness.” Now I have been meaning to blog an entry of this kind for the last several days because this subject has been weighing on my mind as it often does. I have expressed in other entries that relationships are my number one priority in life. As a friend of mine put it the other day, “You are not going to take a U-Haul to heaven” when I mentioned how nice it would be to have all my nice materialistic possessions next to my hospital bed when I die. I was joking in the fact that I would rather have those hundreds of people that I care for dearly next to my hospital bed instead of a bunch of junk even though I do love a good Plasma HD big flat screen TV.

I honestly think the south is a great place including more specifically Auburn. There are great people here with great traditions and certainly fun times with memories to be made. Still as I grow older, I am surprised at how easily some individuals let go of relationships as if they mean nothing when perhaps the other party concerned thought such meant everything. Now please realize I am referring more to the friendship level with persons who have been friends for quite some time (perhaps of one, two, or more years). After a hard breakup, sometimes all you can do is let go of the other person who was once your best friend with the closeness of a significant other. That is just part of life…letting go of what you would prefer to hold dearly onto. I myself do not take giving up on a friendship lightly, and if so, it is usually at the point when I realize the other person will never care to the point of no return. But I have a challenging question for those who may act not to care: Why do you not care?

I think in the answer to such a question you will find a very selfish answer that includes all of us. We do not care because at times we care more about our own wellbeing than our fellow friends around us. As individualistic vessels of thinking and self-awareness, Americans at certain points in time naturally can sometimes be very self-righteous. We are so busy. We have so much to do. We have to pass Qualifiers, Comps, write papers, grade papers, graduate with a Masters at the top of our class while simply ignoring perhaps our fellow classmates and human beings around us. I write in terms of this example because this is the mindset that I currently get caught up in.

Southern hospitality is an honest observation on one hand while it is a mythical farce on the other. People in the South are hospitable. We open doors for each other. We go to church. We have the best food on the planet, and occasionally we treat those less fortunate than ourselves to such luxurious self cuisine. On the surface level, we are very nice people who are very nice to each other. On another level, sometimes the surface is all you get because we are southern, and we are proud of it. We are proud to the extent that we grew up in privileged families in proper ways where you go to college, you get married, you have babies, you collect stuff, you retire, and you look back at all the nice things you have (sometimes instead of all the nice things you have experienced). For some of us, our script is written for us before we decide to write it ourselves that this is the way it should be so we accept it as this is the way life is. Our southern pride does not come from our efforts to be hospitable; it comes from our efforts to live a scripted lifestyle that in itself is so hospitable to the eyes of those who gaze upon it. We forget that hospitability is really about serving others, and for those who enter the south without this paradigm understanding and enculturation (playing games and factitiously ignoring people even when saying, “Hello. How are you?” just to be polite even though we do not care about the answer) we come across as just rude, fake, and unauthentic in the fact that we too are human beings with real problems and imperfections. We ignore life and other people in achieving our own agendas in this mask disguise that living in the south is indeed the best way to live. Is it the best way? Or is it the best act of performance in self-deception that no wonder southern hospitality is more of a myth than a reality?

I write using “we” in the first person because I struggle with these things just as much as any southern person who recognizes the fact that they exist. I just hope that in my own self-acknowledgment I want to better myself in living as real as possible so that southern hospitality is not a mythic farce but rather that it becomes an addictive reality because the example that I set and give in servanthood (in a Christ-like manner) is so attractive that people recognize Southern hospitality and what to experience it for what it truly is.

I have written this entry to unnerve you, to make you uncomfortable, and the make you think (if you have perhaps never thought of it this way). I have written this entry to make you observe that other people around you may in fact be living in “restlessness and groveling in darkness.” Do you really want to be the individual that ignores such a need in another person when all it takes is a phone call to see how that person is doing? There honestly may be nothing you can do, but you can at least be there. When someone seeks to strengthen a friendship and actually puts forth the active effort to do so, those might be the type of friends worth having around when you realize you cannot take your U-Haul to a better place at the end of your journey. Those are the type of friends who stick by thick and thin, and those are the type of people that I myself am at least choosing not to let go so easily when a little bit of turbulence presents itself in the reality of our relationship.