The Alliance

Nugget and pearl of wisdom from Santa Monica Days: Iraq and Iran – the adventures of turtle/babysitting. Fawn’s Santa Monica friends (Anders and Liz), named their turtles Iran and Iraq to bring peace to the Middle East. The reasoning for the choice of their names was that every time they called their turtles lovingly by their names, they not only sent their turtles love but they held loving kindness for the Middle East at the same time. Words have power. Fawn and Matt begin relating words, numbers, zeros, ones and computer coding. Matt corrects Fawn and says as a programmer, he thinks “all things are code, code is not necessarily math. It’s Boolean logic and saying it’s a bunch of zeros and ones fails to convey the true majesty that is.”

This week’s topic is about the first time you felt the power of friendship and what it did for you and your life.

The alliance that we talk about this week is all about the sense that together, you’re able to do ANYTHING. You can overcome racial injustice, you can overcome economic injustice. You're able to overcome any obstacle or any hurt in front of you, TOGETHER.

This is why we began this friendly movement, because we’ve found that our society has really deteriorated as far as people really being together in neighborhoods, offices and at home, and how in-person friendships, walking arm in arm is now rare.

Friendship and the alliance that is created within that sanctuary are incredibly powerful and we wonder why it has disappeared and why we've become so disconnected. Together, we can create great beauty, peace and strength and have a kinder, healthier, richer, more compassionate world, and a stronger, more balanced society.

Do you have a first Alliance story? When was the first time that you felt the kind of friendship where you felt the power of a union, the power of a bond that made you feel invincible? What was it that drew you together? What was the common thread?

Feeling the great life pressures, not feeling supported and feeling upset and overwhelmed (and maybe not even realizing you have been feeling all of this), can wreak havoc on us, our lives, our health, and our relationships, and as a result, bad things can happen. When you’re in the thick of it, you don't understand that you're in pain because it feels normal until you get a break from it (if you get a break from it).  

So we need to support each other. People do communicate their deepest pains. It may be subtly. It may be slyly. And if you're paying attention, you can pick up on it and you can ask the questions.  A friendship is a cocoon where you can grow into what you're supposed to be, within a safe environment. You're protected within this friendship, within this circle.

We've all been disconnected. Come back and don't judge so much. Everybody's in pain. Don't judge it. Let's just be together and offer comfort. Let's provide a safe space for our friends to express the things they need to, and then in return, they will provide us a safe space so we can communicate the things we need to communicate.

Many of us have been treated “less than”, felt generally alone and absolutely isolated. It is a horrible feeling. How can we be heard and also hear our fellow brothers and sisters? It's about trying to focus in on what we can do. And here's the issue: we don't have a society where friends are a thing, (like real, for real friends, not talking Facebook friends but someone who has your back and can offer a shoulder to lean on).

  When we don't have friendship, when we don’t have support, our capacity is limited, and we tend to lash out. This is why making sure that we develop bonds with one another is so important. It’s time to begin talking and paying attention to each other and finding common ground.

An alliance makes for a healthier, happier life. We all need a friend we can take a break with, have some fun with, even if it's just a superficial friendship, one you're just having fun with. We always talk about the three categories of friendship from Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics and how the true lasting friend is the one who loves you for you, but sometimes you just need that friend to have meaningless, stupid fun with. That can be enough to get you through.

We need human connection. We're social animals, people. We are animals. We are social animals. This is how we've survived for hundreds of thousands of years

The key about people and temper tantrums; when you see somebody lashing out, getting angry, getting frustrated, yelling, raising their voice, acting like a child, you have to see this person as a person and start to understand the why's of it. Why are they acting this way? What led them to this place? And you know, of course there are those times where that's not going to work, but in general, people have bad days and people have bad days for a number of reasons and you need to have more compassion for them.

Be a good host. Try. Try and listen. And if that doesn't work, walk away, but remember how you become friends in the first place. You meet by chance. You discuss something completely inane. And then you realize that there might be something deeper and you exchange information or you see them every day on the playground. And then you slowly but surely become friends because of shared interests and shared experiences. So work on being a good host for starters. A good host knows when to bounce people out the house, but a good host also knows how to make people who want to be there, feel welcomed.

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