Pausing to Make a Friend

>Tuan contemplates the motions of time and space and reminds us of how place is a pause in movement.  Place differs from space in its ability to evoke intimacy.  In a place, we have paused to appreciate the given area in which we find ourselves.  We seem to always be drifting in space and it is the place that grounds us.  It is the anchor that brings us back to reality - a reality we construct amid the other realities we simultaneously deconstruct.  The experience of place is only a real experience if it totally enrobes you in its own world - if it makes you travel standing still.  I find that the process of forming connections with places is the same as when we form connections with people: the process of constructing friendships.

When we meet someone with whom we feel a deep connection, we immediately begin creating the reality in which the relationship resides.  We make a world of meaning that only the people forming the connection understand.  Through a series of shared experiences and shared aspirations we develop our own language.  I know that when I’m talking to a best friend around other people, most people cannot even understand how we communicate because of the various names and gestures we have made up to signify various meanings.  Tuan writes, “a brief but intense experience is capable of nullifying the past so that we are ready to abandon home for the promised land.” (184) I see home in this passage as a known place and the promised land as an unknown place.  The adventure of pursuing that unknown promised land with someone is a blind leap into the intensity of true friendship.  It is a demonstration of mutual vulnerability that provides the core experience for a relationship.  

Intimate friendships are a pause in the perpetual mundane - a passage into an alternate reality of fun.  We actively reject any and all external realities; the outside world does not exist when sharing intimate moments.  Place and friendship are similar in that regard, but friendships require more social construction.  We arrive in a space, pause, think and deem it a place.  We return if the intimacy of the place is strong enough.  A friendship on the other hand requires work from the start.  We simply don’t arrive into friendships the same way we arrive into places.  But the same removal from a wider shared reality into one you construct is unifying phenomenological thread.