{"id":11624,"date":"2010-02-15T20:53:24","date_gmt":"2010-02-16T01:53:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=11624"},"modified":"2010-02-15T20:53:45","modified_gmt":"2010-02-16T01:53:45","slug":"friendship-is-unnatural","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2010\/02\/friendship-is-unnatural\/","title":{"rendered":"Friendship is Unnatural"},"content":{"rendered":"

Previous<\/strong><\/a> | Green Hill Communities <\/strong><\/p>\n

\"800px-SantaBarbaraSunrise_4823\"I love the interactive nature of blogging. I had planned to close this series with a post neatly tying everything together, but all of your contributions have challenged my premises and preconceptions to the point that I can’t do it. I started this series with some really good ideas, as well as some very naive ones. In a year or so, as I’ve been able to sort between the two, perhaps I’ll come back with a follow-up series. In the meantime, let me close this series by touching on friendship. (And I have a couple more posts unrelated to community building I plan to write before I finish my guest-blogging stint here at T&S, so I’m not gone just yet.)<\/p>\n

At BYU I studied dance education. Chris Ollerton, one of my teachers, complained to us how parents don’t appreciate the value of dance lessons. “They think that dance comes naturally to children,” she said. “Well music comes naturally to children too, but that doesn’t mean they don’t need to take piano lessons.” Friendmaking is the same. We assume that everyone naturally learns the skill of making friends as children, but it’s not true — many of us feel lonely and isolated, and don’t know how to take even the first step toward building the deeply sincere friendships we dream of enjoying.<\/p>\n

Loving, fun, respectful relationships are the key to everything else I’ve written about. Lifestyle, space, programs, and other considerations are mostly useless unless they are designed with the end goal of bringing people together. I wish I knew enough about friendship to give you some theory, some lesson, that you could apply toward making friends. I’m still working on that one. But mostly I want to leave you with the hope that, if you want to be a community builder but have difficulty initiating friendships, that’s okay. You’ll get better at it with experience.<\/p>\n

Previous<\/strong><\/a> | Green Hill Communities<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love the interactive nature of blogging. I had planned to close this series with a post neatly tying everything together, but all of your contributions have challenged my premises and preconceptions to the point that I can’t do it. I started this series with some really good ideas, as well as some very naive ones. In a year or so, as I’ve been able to sort between the two, perhaps I’ll come back with a follow-up series. In the meantime, let me close this series by touching on friendship.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":131,"featured_media":11636,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/02\/800px-SantaBarbaraSunrise_4823.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/131"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11624"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11638,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11624\/revisions\/11638"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}