my friends don't give a f*ck about any of this... they don't read any of it!
Imagine that, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, a professor at MIT, and in the words of a good friend "the most real kind of intellectual" whose friends, or at least some of them, are not at all interested in Literature... Reflection on the apparent contradiction between Diaz and this portion of his immediate social network has led me to the question above... "Do you have a balanced diet of friends?", Do I?
When I say "balanced diet of friends"? Well, simply stated, that your friends have different interests, beliefs, backgrounds, and aspirations than you do; they spend their time pursuing different passions, investigating different curiosities, paving different paths.
The response to this question, I believe, revels something quite important about how each of us approaches the world and understands our place in it. If we do not, in fact, have friends that provide balance to our own lives, how can we honestly gauge the importance of our own endeavors, or better said, how can we defend against the selfish impulse to believe that whatever we are doing is super ultra-important? How can we find the perspective we lack in the face of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual turmoil? How can we fuel our own growth and maturation? How can we ever see that our problems, no matter how unique we think they are, can be understood by others? - diverse experiences, at the end of the day, usually lead to universal lessons. How deep an understanding of self can we achieve if it is not thought the hearts and minds of a diverse collective?
As a very close friend recently asked me, "Why do so many people want only friends that are the same as them?" - The answer, now more than ever, I simply fail to grasp.
Come to think of it, maybe it is in part because Diaz has friends who could not care less about his success and notoriety that he is the type of artist and the quality of intellectual that so many of us greatly admire. Maybe it is because he understands that no analysis of literature, history, or society is going to end the world - an understanding that apparently is reinforced through his diverse friendships, that he can so honestly speak about the privilege to make the analysis in the first place.
If in reading this post you feel that your social network could use a little influx of diversity, then do not hesitate to act. New relationships that provide fundamentally different lenses through which too see life could be the same relationships that guide you into the next great chapter of life. Buena Suerte.
