ON THE NATURE OF RELATIONSHIPS
Your “friends” should never tell you who you can
associate with
Human relationships are forever fascinating. I’ve long been interested in the interplay
between two partners, and what can be called the “chemistry” between them. What, for example, really brings two people
together? Is it common interests, or
different interests? What makes the
relationship tick, and what tears it apart?
I have concluded that each human relationship is very much
like a chemistry experiment, whereby different chemical-soup mixtures combine
or don’t combine with any of the other chemical-soup mixtures that we call the
dynamic human. One day I hope to
publish a book on relationships and perhaps I’ll be bold enough to make some
meaningful comments and suggestions.
For today, I want to explore one issue that I have
experienced all my life in various relationships, though it tends to pop up the
most in business relationships.
Someone will say, “If you do business with that person, you
cannot do business with me!” I have had
it said to me, and my knee jerk reaction is nearly always, “OK, then I will not
do business with you. I do business with whom I choose, and if you have a
problem with X, that is your problem alone.”
I can recall as a child in grammar school when one of the
popular boys told me the same thing.
“You cannot be my friend if you are going to pal around with
so-and-so.” Really? I was usually too
frightened as a child to openly challenge such a statement, and I would
maintain my friendship with the outcast anyway. I learned – in time -
that the bossy boy was very insecure and he wasn’t really my friend anyway, not
in the ways that mattered.
And as I continued to “pal around” with the new kid in
school, who I was told to not associate with, I found someone who was
different, unique, and who became a lifelong friend. It is perhaps because I often felt like an outcast myself growing
up that I have found myself attracted to the so-called oddballs and misfits of
the world, most of whom are far more fascinating and interesting than the
so-called normal people.
More recently, where I conduct a regular outdoor public
event, some of the local residents would hang out at my booth where I conducted
the administrative aspects of the event. My assistant told me privately that I
should not allow one particular person to stay around my booth. The young man in question lived locally, and
was known to be affiliated with a notorious L.A. gang. Some people felt intimidated by this man’s
presence.
However, it has never been my policy to expel or repel
anyone based on such things; as long as his behaviour in my presence was
appropriate, I had no reason to repel him. I gradually got to know this
man. He needed income, and so little by
little I put him to work doing various small tasks at the weekly outdoor event,
much to the dismay of my assistant. Plus,
this was a public space, not private property, so I did my best to make this a
good situation for everyone. Through my
comments and suggestions, this young man gradually was able to refine his
communication skills when talking with my customers, and even began to dress a
little better when he came to our market.
From my perspective, I may have been one of the few people who
interacted with him in a positive way, even encouraging him to get more work,
and where to find it. I never looked down my nose at him, so to speak.
To my surprise, there were a few times when other individuals
harshly criticized me or our market, and this young man strongly and eloquently defended me. I was shocked because I didn’t expect it,
and it was not necessary, and yet, nothing more needed to be said or done. I chose to view it as “what goes around, comes
around,” as this young man felt so much a part of our market that he would
stand up to defend us.
This is just one small example where something positive
flowed from a situation that others viewed as negative.
Yes, like everyone, I like to surround myself with good
friends. And yet, I have never forgotten the insightful words of Moshe Dayan,
who said “Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.”
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