The Practice of Friendship

September 5, 2025 Pat Moriarty

To read today’s post and hear the recording, please go to the Just A Thought website. Please click here.

This post is dedicated to my friend Ray Levias, who in high school gave me some of my first real lessons in friendship.

Over the past forty years one of the greatest things I’ve learned has been the preeminent importance of the practice of friendship.

It’s been said friends are siblings God never gave us.

If that’s true then we are all part of one very large family.

Just think of what friendships do for you:

they fertilize the mind
they heal the heart
they power the soul

When you practice friendship your world is vastly enriched.

But as a young man I didn’t get it.

I thought what I DID in life was what mattered.

My scorecard was measured in accomplishments, not friends.

Then, after a bellyful of trouble I learned — I’d gotten it all wrong.

Friendships were what mattered.

That revelation came 45 years ago while working for Control Data, an early computer company, on a farm project in the foothills of the Brooks range in Alaska, 90 miles north of the arctic circle.

One morning I got the news that two Inuit members of my team froze to death the night before not 30 feet from the bar where they had been drinking.

I remember attending the funeral and feeling hollowed out, not just because I’d lost two teammates, but because I had hardly known them.

never socialized with them
never met their families
never understood their problems

It dawned on me that most people with whom I worked were no more to me than

associates
colleagues
collaborators

Not friends.

I left the funeral feeling deeply shaken, knowing over the course of my life I had developed few close friends

I was unschooled in the practice of friendship.

But why?

Throughout my life I seem to have two categories of relationships

people who were less than me
people who were more than me

No one the same.

How the could I ever have close friendships when I lived in such isolation?

This was a shocking revelation to me.

The funeral precipitated a deep conversation within myself about

what I was doing
why I was doing
how I was doing

Something wasn’t working in my life.

For too long I’d been focused on proving myself not sharing myself.

Turns out I was a well-kept secret, not only from others but also myself.

so sad
so true

Ultimately my conversation led me to a turning point which sent me in an entirely different direction.

I sobered up and stopped scoring my life by what I was doing. Instead, I began to look at how I was being.

I began consciously developing friendships built on mutual trust, respect, and unconditional support — and a way more satisfying life emerged for me.

My first opportunity to practice a conscious friendship came in my 12-step program when my home group asked me to serve as the coffee maker.

Service is the cornerstone of 12-Step recovery.

It was a month into my coffee making service when a recent transplant from Princeton, New Jersey showed up 30 minutes before the meeting wanting to help out.

Pete was nothing like me. His background was different, his interests were different, his personality was different. We had nothing in common except our

alcoholism
recovery
service

What ensued was what I would call my first really conscious friendship.

On the outside Pete was completely unlike me, yet on the inside Pete was a whole lot like me.

All it took to discover this was to see Pete as every bit my equal.

What began as a simple service assignment blossomed into a friendship that, in an earlier time, would never have existed.

It was as if I came in from the cold and joined the human race.

I stumbled upon a strange paradox:

when I give myself — I’m found
when I help others — I’m helped

Or, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke said of love, the same could be said of a conscious friend:

In the practice of friendship I finally found what I’d been looking for all my life:

A real way to make a difference in the world

As a postlude to this post and as a testimony to the power of friendship I’d like to recognize the Seattle Prep class of ’67 and how it has rallied around Ray during this time.

We love you, Ray.

*****

Now a song for ALL our dear friends —

Just a thought…

Pat