Friends, clothes, and salt

The Honors Lecture went well, I thought. I enjoyed talking about Aristotle and Wendell, and friendship and happiness. 

The Instagram photo my colleague posted was not flattering, I  thought. My wife said I need new pants. 

But then I thought about what Thoreau said. "I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes."

Right. And somebody else--not, evidently, Mrs. Roosevelt or David Foster Wallace--said something smart too, about the vanity of fretting over superficial appearances and judgments. "You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do."

So what I hope my audience took away was the central message about the importance of investing in our closest relationships, nurturing and sustaining them, not waiting for governments and institutions or philosopher-gurus to swoop down with solutions to what's not working in our social life. We must build and model trust, mutuality, and reciprocity for ourselves, at home and in our neighborhoods and communities. Wendell's "Think Little" quote sums it up: "We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities." 

We need, in other words, to take responsibility and put first things first. 

I hope they also got the point of those slides at the end, and that line from Aristotle about men sharing salt (“men cannot know each other till they have ‘eaten salt together’...”) and something to wash it down with.  You've gotta have friends.