The Fifteenth Insight Into Living A Quality Life On Your Own Terms:

Choose your friends carefully; choose your tribe carefully.
Protect your time; protect your energy.

 There are many pathways in this life and it doesn't matter which one you take, for they all have a common destination, and that is the grave. But some paths give you energy and some take it away.
      - Cervantes

Just as some paths give you energy, and some take it away, some people give you energy and some take it away. It is important, in living a quality life on your own terms, and doing work that is unique, that you put thought into relationships. It is important that you put energy into relationships that enhance your energy. The path of creating unique work is often discouraging, particularly in the early stages. Kindred spirits will build your energy.

Seek the stable center in relationships: relationship with yourself, relationship with your work, relationship with others. Serve harmony. Serve beauty. If you can’t find the peaceful center in a relationship, withdraw.

Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.
-   Thoreau, in his journal

Journal questions on friendship:

Will this action, this friendship, this relationship, this effort, this work, give me power or diminish it? Lots of things I'd like to do, when I really think on it, I know will dissipate my power.

. . .

There are some subjects, in putting this book together, that hurt, that are difficult to write about. Choosing one’s tribe carefully is one of those for me. I’ve spent years pouring my thought and soul into a variety of business ventures. Many initially were highly profitable: commercial real estate brokerage, real estate investment, investment management and research, financial statement trend analysis, artificial intelligence stock price analysis. All ultimately lost momentum and ended in dead ends.

Why? There are a variety of factors but none more profound than I didn’t like my clients and they didn’t like me. Wasn’t my tribe. So I say put thought who you want to serve. To create harmony in your life, serve those you respect. It can save years of wasted effort and grief.

You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You might be a socialite with a long string of pearls
But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.
      - Bob Dylan, from the song Gotta Serve Somebody

I respect people with integrity, who care about others or care about wildlife and wild places. People who care about something other than just themselves. People who read. People who think. People who welcome new ideas.

I like to be around thoughtful risk takers. Courage is required to get a lot out of life.

I like to be around people who take ideas and manifest them through hard work and persistence. People with imagination, creativity, open mindedness.

I want to serve kindhearted, considerate people. There is no point in being a great artist, but a miserable person who is mean to others. I’ve known artists like that and in fact fallen in love with their work. But I don’t want them as friends. I don’t want to serve them.

It is important not to impose standards on others (or yourself) that are not achievable. None of us is perfect. None of us is honest all of the time. But I need to serve, and be around, and have friends, who try. Otherwise, I’ve learned the hard way, my work in service of them fails to gather momentum.

Journaling questions about identifying your tribe and determining who to serve in your work:

What group of humans light up your imagination?
What group of humans can you pour your heart and soul into serving?
Who do you want to celebrate life with?
Who do you respect and want to learn from?

. . .

Farewell, my friends, my path inclines to this side the mountain, yours to that. For a long time you have appeared further and further off to me. I see that you will at length disappear altogether. For a season my path seems lonely without you. The meadows are like barren ground. The memory of me is steadily passing away from you. My path grows narrower and steeper, and the night is approaching.
     Yet I have faith that, in the definite future, new suns will arise, and new plains expand before me, and I trust that I shall therein encounter pilgrims who bear that same virtue that I recognized in you, who will be that very virtue that was you. I accept the everlasting and salutary law, which was promulgated as much that spring that I first knew you, and this that I seem to lose you.
     - Thoreau, in his journal, March 28, 1856

 

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.

     - Ralph Waldo Emerson

When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too.  If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.  How often, in a large city, shaking hands with my friends, I have felt the wilderness stretching between us.  Both of us were wandering in arid wastes, having lost the springs that nourished us -- or having found them dry.  Only when one is connected to one's own core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover.  And for me, the inner spring, can best be found through solitude.
      - Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea.

 

Go often to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.
      - Emerson

  

More From Thoreau On Love And Friendship

Thoreau’s thoughts on love and friendship surprised me more than any other part of the research I did for Thoreau And The Art Of Life. The subject obviously mean a lot to him; he thought deeply and profoundly about it. I would go as far as to say that he was an extremely sensitive man, and that sensitivity is reflected in all his writing, including that which expresses doubts about the goodness of humanity, and the long-term potential of our species.
     When Henry’s brother died of lockjaw (tetanus), Thoreau suffered from the symptoms of lockjaw for several months.

Research note:

Many entries in Thoreau’s journals are undated—in particular the entries from the 1840s when he was in his twenties and early thirties -— his peak in terms of creative output. (Thoreau went to live at Walden Pond in 1845 at the age of 28; Walden was published in 1854. He died in 1862, at the age of 44, of tuberculosis).  Rather than end every undated entry with “Journal Entry, Date Unknown,” the undated entries contain no caption.

The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?

Friendship is never established as an understood relation. It is a miracle which requires constant proofs. It is an exercise of the purest imagination and of the rarest faith.

Those whom we can love, we can hate; to others we are indifferent.

You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant, tells you more about that one than words can. 

Love is an attempt to change a piece of a dream-world into reality.

In the love of narrow souls I make many short voyages but in vain - I find no sea room - but in great souls I sail before the wind without a watch, and never reach the shore. 

The language of friendship is not words but meanings. 

Between whom there is hearty truth, there is love. 

There is no remedy for love but to love more.
- Journal entry, 1839

Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.
     - journal entry, 1841

How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we may go and meet their ideal cousins.
-   A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1849

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.
     - A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1849

Nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all; that is, her scenes must be associated with humane affections, such as are associated with one's native place, for instance.  She is most significant to a lover.  A lover of Nature is preeminently a lover of man.  If I have no friend, what is Nature to me?  She ceases to be morally significant.
     - Journal entry, 1852 

Love is a thirst that is never slaked.  Under the coarsest rind, the sweetest meat.  If you would read a friend aright, you must be able to read through something thicker and opaquer than horn.  If you can read a friend, all languages will be easy to you.  Enemies publish themselves.  They declare war.  The friend never declares his love.
- Journal entry, 1856

And now another friendship is ended. I do not know what has made my friend doubt me, but I know that in love there is no mistake, and that every estrangement is well-founded.
- Journal entry, February 8, 1857

I honor your Gods
I drink from your well
I bring an unprotected heart to our meeting place.
I hold no cherished outcome
I will not negotiate by withholding
I am not subject to disappointment. 
- Druid Friendship vow.