Reflecting on noble friendships at year-end
If this newsletter has made meaningful impact on your life, been an influence on your parenting, daughtering, neighboring, befriending—would you consider paying for it? It helps me keep trucking along each and every week, delivering observations and stories that get to the heart of things that matter to you and me, both. Thank you so much.
We live in a time of sages on stages—people who spend a lot of time building a “platform” and then marketing their wisdom, expertise, 5-point plans, and frameworks to the rest of us. Think TED talks. Think Instagram influencers. Think New York Times columnists.
Sometimes these sages can be genuinely helpful. They help us navigate new trends, like Ezra Klein’s podcasting on artificial intelligence, or offer ways of understanding ourselves and those around us better, like Suzanne Stabile’s enneagram explorations or Ross Gay’s delights.
But too often, even when they’re helpful, we think of these as individual contributions, when in fact, everyone is building on a lineage of disciplines, influences, models, and anti-models. All of our ideas are born of infinite layers of information, experiences, relationships, that we took in and—little by little—made our own. This is something I’ve talked a lot about with my friend and writer, Amanda Machado, and even co-created some curriculum around for the speakers bureau I co-founded, FRESH. And I was also recently reminded of it while reading a Freedom’s Revival: A Field Guide, gathered by Mia Birdsong and Saneta deVuono-powell, chockfull of visible influences via footnotes, epigraphs, and other very intentional structural choices.
We need to do better at citing our influences (see Cite Black Women) from an ethical perspective, but also we can do more to celebrate, revel in, and enjoy how vast and deep our own personal influences are. As writer and sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom explains: “Writing is always a brutally social process that is rude enough to masquerade as a solitary one.”
Of course all good thinking and creating, like caring, takes a proverbial village. Who do you have conversations with that always light you up? Whose writing makes your heart skip a beat? Whose art makes your mind spin out in a million wonderful directions?
I’ve started borrowing a Buddhist phrase for this in my own mind— “noble friendships.” And I’ve got so many of them. I spent some time mapping some of my noble friendships over the last year here…
This is woefully incomplete, but it was such a joy to do!
I also mapped as many of the thinkers, organizers, and noble friends that I could remember that shaped my thinking on my last book, Learning in Public. Here’s that map:
Isn’t it thrilling, to know that you are neither an individual failure nor an individual success, but a thread in a huge tapestry of beautiful people trying to make cool shit and be good neighbors? This is true in “real life,” but it’s also true on stages and in op-ed pages and in art galleries, and anywhere else you see people opining about what they think is important.
Everyone you are learning from learned from others. Everyone you read, read others. Everyone you listen to, listened to others. We are one big beautiful scrum of evolving thinking and feeling.
Thinking this way really takes the pressure off of that next project, doesn’t it? Just throw something worthwhile and imperfect in the mix! It’s a tribute to your past teachers and an offering to your future students, not to mention all your noble friends. And as Audre Lorde reminds us: “There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.”
Make your own maps, would ya?! It can be about your 2023—reflect back on who influenced you, inspired you, enraged you in a motivating way—and write it/draw it all down. Or it can be about a particular theme or project—who influenced the last song you wrote, or your parenting style, or your approach to gardening? We’ll share them in Substack chat if you’re there. (And check out my collaborator
‘s prompt this week on influences! It’s very in cahoots with this post.)Finally, share this newsletter with a noble friend. Or better yet, buy them a gift subscription to this newsletter!
I have thought of this subject, or list, at several levels. There are the big influences on me of whom I might have a tangible physical reminder, purposely placed. I have, for example, a clay sculpture of two women, an older and a younger, in the center of my work area. If I could be said to have a role model, that older was she. She is dead now over thirty years.
There are books read long ago with oversized influence.
Then I had recently, now misplaced, I notice, a bubble drawing of people I am reading or following now, some of whom regularly say things that answer something I am working on. I cannot truly call them friends, as they don't know me. I hear their voices, read their voices, but they cannot hear mine. If I sent them a thank you, it would only be lost in their mail.
Then there are those in my life in a reciprocal way now.
I agree it is a valuable exercise to know who these people are and to hold our thanks in our hearts of not convey them in person.
Thank you Courtney. I love the practice of naming the "noble friendships" and knowing that we are not alone - the beautiful tapestry. Such wise and soothing words today!