Loyalty is important, right? The card says faithful to my friends, group.
I am deeply faithful to my friends. Particularly in recent years, as mortality has become so very real to us, a lot of priorities and things I thought were important have fallen away. But not so with friendships. The opposite! I’m loyal and faithful and defensive and ready to do battle. Building on recent essays, it’s often a deep sense of loyalty that informs even my feelings of violence toward perceived violators.
I have the capacity for peacefulness. But I can be vicious. My tongue is generally tied down pretty well, but as I reflect, there’s little that animates me more than a friend in need. And I think I’m leaning into that as I age. It’s always been this way, I come by my love for my friends honestly. But I think I’m learning to want it. And I’m learning to tame it.
My violence and my judgement can be, (is not always), loyalty off the chain. Out of alignment with my values more broadly.
Because remember, our lived experiences often just happen to us. We can no more control their happenings than the sun or the rain which falls on the just and the unjust alike.
Our lived experiences affect and shape our values, which inform our vision and mission, which inform our goals, tasks and time management. Again we can see that pivot point between our experiences and values, and our behaviors and actions and thoughts. This time it’s the mission. It’s the “what we do to get there”. If I’m living my life in tasks and time management, I’m liable to be reactive and my sense of loyalty will be informed by that reactivity.
If my sense of loyalty is unchained, unharnessed, unattended, I am like a mob boss. Exerting power and dominance for The Family. My sense of loyalty will bowl anyone over, I’ll bring down the whole theater to protect my own.
But there’s a kinder way. By observation of my values, consistently, internally, reiterating their supreme importance in my life, I calm myself and I see my actions and behaviors in real time, or even ahead of time, allowing my values and beliefs to inform them.
When my value for loyalty is brought into tow, when I am observational master of it, I can render it as love for my friends, my family, my people. It’s ultimately all about the people around us.
When my value for loyalty is observed and honored, I am able to honor the people around me with my clearest self and be a benefit to them rather than a liability.
I have two stories involving the same friend which I will share now. This friend has been a good friend for many years now. We are about the same age and we are very different kinds of guys. Where I am loud, he is quiet. Where I am reactionary and action-focused he is contemplative and thoughtful. These are the friends I attract in my life. These are traits that are weirdly common among those closest to me.
The first story. I’ll skip many details to protect the innocent. And also the guilty.
I was once a part of a group, (along with this friend of mine), and we were once planning a grand new venture. Lots of moving pieces. I was not a particularly welcome member of the group for reasons I won’t go into here and now. But as we’ve established, my friend was the opposite kind of guy; he was the right kind of guy for the group. He was welcome, I was not, but we both had a lot of skin in the game.
The short end of the long story is that there ended up being a deeply inappropriate show of machismo and a gross power imbalance involving all the male members of the group. I’d gotten on the wrong side of the wrong “leader” and he was going to let me know about it. I had stepped over a leadership-line. I’d had the wrong idea and it couldn’t be allowed to pass unchallenged.
And this young man friend of mine, (we were both so young then), was the only one–The ONLY one–to stand with me. He didn’t even “take my side” on the issue at hand. I was ugly-crying in front of most of the men I’d come to adore and admire, (plus a number of their pubescent sons who’d been invited for the dressing-down); my world was beginning to shatter. I was learning how unwelcome I was and my heart was breaking. The cracks begin to show.
And my friend sat at the table next to me and held my hand. I got angry. I got defensive. I was young and I understand now that I was being inappropriately attacked by older men who were meant to have loved me and looked out for me. And they weren’t–they didn’t. And there wasn’t a damned thing my friend could do about it except hold my hand. I was positively writhing in my seat. I know I didn’t respond well. I often didn’t in those days.
That’s it. That’s the story. A friend loyally held my hand in a time of pain and humiliation. He showed loyalty to me by being there for me, even when it may have cost him something socially. It was love and loyalty as a shelter.
Next story. Same friend. A year or two later. You may recall my “kitchen floor moment”. It was in that era of my life. Early coffee career. We had a couple of kids by then, little tiny things. Couldn’t do anything for themselves. Couldn’t feed themselves. Couldn’t wipe their own butts or play by themselves. Really a profoundly needy time in their lives.
I planned a getaway for my wife and me. I found this cute cabin up on the McKenzie River. I thought it was perfect! We were right on the river, Friday night, Saturday and Sunday! We didn’t have to be back until Sunday evening. It was, as I mentioned, a very stressful time in our lives and we needed the getaway. But my wife is a deeply responsible person and was very conscious of the burden watching kids for a whole weekend could be.
This friend of mine had gotten married, (I stood in their wedding), and they’d offered to watch our kids while we were away. But there was a miscommunication and they were under the impression that we’d be home more like noon on Sunday. It’s a long story but the end of it is that there was a conflict, as sometimes happen, even between friends. Our beautiful wives had brief words and my wife was devastated. She hadn’t intended to take advantage, and my friend’s wife, (also now my friend, for the record), had felt taken advantage of. And as young men do, my friend came to his wife’s defense and aide, and went on the warpath. Just a little bit.
My unchained sense of loyalty kicked in. Like a mob boss with an axe to grind, I held my wife for a moment or two and then joined him in battle, blades drawn, ready to vanquish.
I will not tell you the things I said to my friend who had held my hand under the table. In truth I probably can’t remember most of them. But I remember the feelings I had. I am ashamed.
It is possible, probable, that my friends, newlyweds, childless, used to their time being their own, could have benefited from a broader, gentler conversation about how their words had affected my wife.
But we didn’t make space for that. We attacked. Like a dogs with a bone we attacked and we very nearly killed our friendship entirely. We certainly wounded it deeply.
We are friends today–good friends who love each other with a deep love that would hold hands under the table again. But I think we did not speak for a year. Or two. And it was another year, or two, before we started becoming friendly, and a few years more before it felt like there was some water under the bridge.
That’s the second story. My untamed sense of loyalty for my wife very nearly killed a wonderful friendship that we enjoy today. This was loyalty as a weapon. My untamed desire to protect my wife nearly cost me a friendship and did nothing to actually protect the ones I love.
The card says: Faithful to my friends. I am learning that sometimes, being faithful means holding their hand when they are hurting. And sometimes, being faithful means holding my own tongue when I am hurting.
