Month: January 2018

Watch Your World Fall Apart

Willie’s Joint, near downtown Buda, Texas, features a giant, oversized Jenga game. Players pull out the blocks that seem to be supporting nothing, one block at time, and put them at the top until the whole mess collapses. If you’re the one who causes the collapse, you lose.

Especially during holidays, life imitates Jenga. Hosting family and friends and juggling meal and schedules stack up. Extricating the time to add one more task puts us into Jenga-collapse territory.

We’ve changed our ways to some degree. We’ve pared down our Christmas gift-giving. Our miniaturized plastic Christmas tree sits atop a corner table. Whittle down, whittle down. We’ve gotten good at it, and not just at Christmas time. We don’t want Jenga-collapse. The few important blocks stay at the bottom.

Fewer blocks!

Streamline! Invite the neighbors over? No way!

Spend time watching that time-wasting event on TV? Heck, no!

Efficiency! NOW we’re getting rid of those non-essential blocks!

Finally! We’re down to eating, sleeping, and going to the toilet! We’ve got all that other annoying activity out of our lives! We’ve pared down to hardly any Jenga blocks at all! Victory!

We sit in the silent living room, staring at the interior-designer-approved grey walls. No neighbors to entertain. No jangling cell phones. No nothin’!

That’s when I start missing all the blocks we removed to get to this place. It dawns on me that Jenga did us in. All the activities and distractions that made our lives so much fun are now gone. All our time-wasting friends are gone. They’re precisely where we put them–at the top of the Jenga tower with all the other non-essential things, and out of reach.

Our Jenga base has been reduced to exactly one block wide.

With trepidation, I barely touch that one remaining Jenga base block so as not to destroy the fragile construction.

Then, with one violent motion, I yank it free.

Three in a Row

If you look up “Tic Tac” on the Internet, you are directed either to sites about the breath mint candy, or to an investigation into a mysterious UFO dubbed Tic Tac by the Navy pilot who spotted it.

Won’t go there.

By adding the third word, “Toe” we refer to the game we know as “Tic Tac Toe”. Three words in a row spell the name of the game. Completing three in a row also happens to makes you the winner in this game.

In this huge plastic variant, son-in-law, Randy, and grandson, Linus, seem to be working it out. Tic-tac-toe.

As it turns out, Aristotle believed that friendship is also a three-across proposition, another sort of tic-tac-toe.

Aristotle names the first friendship “accidental” friendship, and it’s easy to fall into. It’s the person you happen to sit next to in an assigned classroom seat, or a person you wind up with on the same train car together, day after day. When the class ends, the travel ends, or the job ends, the friendship fades.

The second friendship is pleasure-based upon mutual interests, and it’s also not hard to discover – I like a certain sports team, and so do you. Or maybe we both rave about the latest movie, or automobile, or restaurant. But then we move on. The friendship based upon mutual interests was good while it lasted.

The third kind of friendship is harder to build. It involves mutual effort and endurance. This third-in-a-row friendship is the tic tac toe winner. It’s called The Friendship of the Good. It values the virtues and qualities within the other person. While these friendships take time to build, they grow more valuable over time, and are long-lasting. They rest on a foundation of mutual esteem and faith. Their value deepens after both persons have been seen both at their best and at their worst. They are some of life’s finest rewards.

Two out of three – “Tic Tac,” brings candy or a UFO story. Or transitory friendships.

But finding The Friendship of the Good completes the “Tic Tac Toe.” And that’s what makes a winning combination.