Gentle Friends Project

This year I'm playing a fun game: a scavenger hunt for nice people. I call it the Gentle Friends Project. The inspiration came from a lace-knitting friend who took up the "Ten Shawls in Twenty-Ten" challenge on Ravelry. The idea is to knit ten beautiful shawls this year. I think she's already on number seven.

Because I'm not yet a seasoned lace knitter, I can't concentrate on those intricate charts while I'm trying to write. (This summer I'm working on a book, and every nano-droplet of focus must be expended on the current chapter.) So I wasn't interested in challenging myself on the hobby front. Instead, I decided, after a year fraught with loss, to encourage myself to reach out to more people.

Particularly, nice people. I have enough, shall we say, thought-provoking folks in my life; my job is chock-full of them. I realized last year that I needed more gentle, kind, easy-going, non-aggressive, pleasant friends. Seems to be a self-evident conclusion, but oddly enough, for some reason, it took quite a bit of work to get myself to that point.

Mostly, I wanted to convince myself that there were plenty of kind people out there. So I came up with the Gentle Friends Project: I challenged myself to find Twelve Nice People in Twelve Months. I thought, at first, that this would become an overwhelming task. I'm by nature somewhat shy around strangers. In large groups I can become very quiet. I'm not particularly aggressive, and I fear rejection as much as any other insecure person. But I told myself: at least give it your best shot.

Nothing to lose, after all.

So I dug through my old emails, address books, lists of attendees at various events, and every other roster or membership roll I could think of. I thought about every pleasant person I'd met in the past few years; anyone with whom I'd ever exchanged a nonspecific lunch or coffee invitation, but was too shy to follow up. As I scanned my lists it suddenly occurred to me that non-aggressive people would be unlikely to pursue a friendship, well, aggressively.

I have to say -- that struck me as a major epiphany. We can't both be quiet and timid. Someone has to make the first step.

The rules of the game are simple: all I have to do is to invite a gentle person into my life. There are few limitations; the person has to be someone with whom I have not yet established a friendship, and she/he has to be temperate and mild-mannered. So, no loud-mouths, no aggressive, combative, belligerent folks. (I'm not saying there's anything wrong with being forceful-- it's just that, in the words of Jack Nicholson, we're all stocked up here, thanks.)

It's okay if I already know and like these people; if we've already talked about plans for coffee, for example; after all, I'm not likely to walk up to a total stranger and bleat, "do you wanna be my fwiend?"

And it's okay if they don't respond. All I have to do is to tender the invitation.

How am I doing, you ask? Here we are in mid-July, and I just met Gentle Friend number ten last night. Isn't that amazing? I've invited nine people into my life; seven of them responded enthusiastically. One said she wished she could join in, but she lives too far away and is about to have a baby. One never responded at all; and one other didn't respond to an emailed invitation, but later made up for it in other ways. (More about that another time.)

Of the seven, I see at least three or four regularly, and am in touch with all the rest.

What does this prove to me? Proves that there are vast numbers of great people out there who are easy to befriend; that gentle people are worth the extra effort; and that I really had nothing to fear. This was all far easier than I could have dreamed.

By the way, last night I went out to dinner with a group of people; I knew a few of them already, but most were either strangers or casual acquaintances. Normally that sort of situation would be productive of a fair bit of anxiety for me. But because the GFP, I felt that I had to make myself go. You see, I was almost out of "game pieces," i.e., nice people I already knew well enough to invite into my life. So I am proud to say that I made one completely new friend as a result of this outing. Some time this week or next I'll follow up.