Friendship Day

Why can't we be friends?

Very rarely have I had a Valentine for Valentine's day, but this year was sort of on the fence.  I have an incredible girlfriend, but didn't get to spend it with her.  Or so it felt.

In Costa Rica, they call February 14 "dia de la amistad" - literally, "day of (the) friendship" or "friendship day."  This caused a bit of self-reflection.  I have a few fairly good friends here, but as I thought about friendship's role in my life here I realized that almost all of them are gringos (white foreigners) like me.  It isn't that I don't have any Tico/Nica friends, but rather that the only ones I've shared my life with in any meaningful way have been...like me.

Why?  Am I a racist?  A sexist?  An ageist?  Normal?  Just as I was contemplating this apparent problem, something completely unexpected happened.  I made a friend.

Is that seat taken?

Buses in Costa Rica are like more crowded versions of New York subways.  You keep your attention on your headphones and don't talk to anyone at the risk of being glared at or avoided like the creature from the black lagoon.  I didn't know this on coming here, and I made that mistake a solid four or five times before I figured it out.  There's one exception: you are always allowed to ask for directions.  I saw a bunch of people waiting at a bus stop I didn't know existed (really just a patch of dirt next to a highway), asked where it led, and the next thing I knew I was talking to this person for the entire ride into San José and part of my walk to work.  In that hour and a half she got the gist of my life story, and I hers.  I had made my first Costa Rican friend and I was feeling pretty good about myself, but here's the kicker:  she's not Costa Rican.  She's an immigrant like me, from El Salvador, and once that came out we spent quite a bit of the time talking about how hard it was to adjust to living in a new place.

As I kept pondering this question, I realized why an apparently single guy had been casual enough to break the ice and keep a conversation going with a single girl on Valentine's day in a context where he wasn't supposed to talk at all: because he didn't have to.  I had no interest in her beyond making that long, boring bus ride pass a little more quickly.  I didn't try to play things up or lay the foundation for some lasting relationship; I just talked.  And listened.

You see, in the end, a longer-term and longer-distance relationship allowed a new friendship to be formed.  I wasn't interested in this girl (which definitely surprised her) precisely because I am interested in someone else.  I feel lucky; I have come to know that person much more deeply through all this distance and the written word.  I am committed, and in that commitment I am free to let other relationships grow or die organically, without my own exertion.  Think about that...I am committed, therefore I am free.

I know that not all of my readers share my own faith, so I won't go into much theological detail here, but I will say that this notion of commitment leading to freedom is the crux (pun intended) of my own view of Christianity.  By faith(fulness) in and to Christ, we are released from the obligation to atone for our own mistakes and free to love every member of God's creation.  That isn't limited to those who experience the same freedom.  In fact, spreading the good news about that freedom is kind of the point.  Sometimes I really wish God would just rip through the fabric of what I see around me and tell me my human ears who he is, who I am, and what I should believe, but that's not the way he works.  Not today, anyway.  He gives us our powers of observation and reason and respect for the millennia of their precedence in the tradition of our ancestors.  We get to know him through his footprints, whether it be the penmanship of scripture or the brushstrokes of creation.  I don't know how relevant that notion is to your own system of belief, but I'd encourage you to consider it a moment (or a lifetime) before tossing it aside as some Christian dogma.

I never really answered my own question as to why my friends are so "like me," but in the exploration of that problem I found something beautiful.  Should I be frustrated or thrilled?  I'm going to try and focus on the latter and on the newfound appreciation for a couple of specific relationships in my life.  Sometimes they feel a bit like a distance relationship, but maybe that isn't such a bad thing after all.