I hope and trust that your life has been wonderful this week. Let me say that the important thing is to be friends.

Be friends with everybody.

Be friends with your spouse. Be friends with your children. Be friends with your relatives. Be friends with your neighbors and your fellow workers and your acquaintances. And yes, even be friends with your enemies.

Just...be friends.

One of the most stinging criticisms I ever received was when someone to whom I was once married, and who I truly and dearly loved, once said to me: "You treat your friends better than you treat me."

I never, ever forgot that. Because I knew it was true. It is absolutely, stunningly true that I had more tolerance for, more patience with, more leniency regarding my friends' behaviors than I did with the person with whom I was sharing my life.

I said things to my life partner that I would never say to a friend. I criticized my life partner for things that I would simply "let go" with a friend. I noticed things with my life partner that I would overlook with a friend. And I let things bother me---annoy me, actually---that my life partner did that wouldn't even faze me if a friend did the exact same thing.

What is this about?, I began to wonder. Why do we so often treat those closest to us as if they were not "close" to us at all? Is it because we know them better than we know our friends, spending more time with them day in and day out as we do? Could it really be true that "familiarity breeds contempt"?

No, no...say it isn't so! Shouldn't familiarity breed compassion, understanding, patience, tolerance, acceptance, and deeper and deeper love? Shouldn't intimate relationship be the place of greatest safety, not of the least?

When I was a small child (which was very, very long ago) there was a song that was popular. Even then it was an Oldie But Goodie, and we had an old phonograph record of it sung by the Mills Brothers that I used to play on the family Victrola (Ha! Does anyone even know who or what I am talking about here---???)

The some was called, You Always Hurt the One You Love. And the lyrics went something like this...if I can remember them now...

You always hurt the one you love
The one you shouldn't hurt at all
You always take the sweetest rose
And crush it `til the petals fall

You always break the kindest heart
With a hasty word you can't recall
So if I broke your heart last night
It's because I love you most of all.

The irony of that song sticks with me to this very day. I have come to deeply regret (and to beg them and the heavens forgiveness for) the many ways that I have treated beloved others who have been close to me, and to realize that one of the greatest gifts we can give to a loved one is friendship. Pure and simple friendship. Just treat them like a Friend. Like we would treat someone we are afraid of losing.

So yes, be friends with your spouse. Be friends with your children. Be friends with your relatives. Be friends with your neighbors and your fellow workers and your acquaintances. And yes, even be friends with your enemies. And most of all...be friends with yourself!

That may be the hardest thing to do of all. And so we'll take a close look at that next week.
PART 2...Okay, so now we get a chance to look at that.

It is true that being one's own best friend can be one of the hardest things in life to do. In my own experience it involved something along the lines of a three-step process, which felt like...

     1. Forgiveness
     2. Acceptance
     3. Celebration

My road to self-friendship began with self-forgiveness. It proceeded to self-acceptance, and it ended with self-celebration. Self-forgiveness was, for me, the biggest challenge.

I have done a lot of things in my life that I am not happy about. I found that I thought about these things all the time. And the more I thought about them, the worse I felt, of course. And also, the more I thought about them, the more I thought about them. Thought begets thought. Emotions give birth to more emotions of the same species. My mind was having its way with me.

I moved into heavy guilt about a lot of my past choices and behaviors. It didn't seem to do me any good to say that "I'll never do that again." What's past is past and can't be undone. So there was nothing to BE done...except live with it. Just "life with" the guilt.

Even if I "cleaned it up" by going to the people I felt I'd hurt and apologizing and offering to do whatever I could to make amends, I still couldn't off-load the guilt. I just couldn't forgive myself.

Then I had my conversation with God, and everything changed. I learned, first, that I was spotless and innocent in the eyes of The Divine. God looked upon me as I would look upon a 4-year-old child. I simply didn't know what I was doing; I simply didn't understand. Even if I really did understand, I actually didn't. I mean, I understood part of it. I grasped a little bit of it. I certainly knew the difference between Right and Wrong, but I didn't understand the Whole Story. I didn't know who I was, where I was, why I was where I was, or what I was trying to do here. No one had given me the answers to life's Four Fundamental Questions. No one had even asked me the questions. I didn't even know these questions existed.

Then, further into my conversation with God, I was told something even more shocking, more stunning to my system. "There is," God said to me, "no such thing as Right and Wrong."

As you can imagine, this overturned my whole value system (not that I was paying much attention to it anyway...). I had to start over from scratch in viewing and evaluating the choices and behaviors of my life.

PART 3 -- I have found that the Key to Forgiveness of myself is not to forgive at all, but to understand.

God has made it very clear to me that when I understand the actions of others, when I understand those others themselves (what informs them, what animates them, what motivates them), forgiveness becomes unnecessary.

All I needed to do to find self-forgiveness, then, was to understand what informed, what animated, what motivated me when I made the choices and decisions I made, and when I behaved as I did.

I am not really a "bad" person. I am not villainous, and my intention in life is not malevolent. I'm not out to "get" anybody, and I don't even seek "revenge" when people have seemed out to "get" me. I'm just an regular guy, a good person, I hope---rather ordinary in my goodness, like the rest of us. I try not to cheat, steal, lie, hurt, damage, or destroy. And yet I have cheated, stolen, lied, hurt, damaged, and destroyed. So what is that about?

It's about my not knowing what in the heck I was doing---and thinking that the only way that I could get what I felt I needed was by doing what I was doing. I was so wrong in that. I was so misinformed. Or ill-informed might be a better word.

All I wanted, in the end, was to be happy. I just wanted to be happy in my life, and I was scrambling around trying to make it happen because I didn't know how to make it happen. No one teaches us how to be happy. There's no Happiness School anywhere. There should be, but there isn't it. Maybe I'll start one. Maybe I'll create the CwG Happiness School...

So there I was, scrambling like a quarterback with a porous front line, darting around the backfield, trying not to be thrown for a Big Loss.

Sooner or later I'd find myself asking meekly, "Uh...can we run that play over again...?"

I did some things during that scramble that I am not proud of, some things that hurt other people...but now I understand why I did them. I understand that I wasn't trying to hurt anybody. And even though I knew that some things would hurt somebody, I did them not wanting them to be hurt, and just wondering in my simple mind, Why can't we all just be happy, without making someone else unhappy in the bargain?

And it's all because I didn't know how to be happy...or where to even find happiness. Or, worse yet, what happiness even was.

So if a person promises to pick you up at six, but doesn't arrive until nine-thirty, and the party you were going to is over, you might feel like you have something to forgive. But if, when they arrive at the door breathless and perspiring and shameful and embarrassed and chagrined and desperately hoping for forgiveness, they tell you that they actually started out an hour ahead of time but became hopelessly lost...suddenly, forgiveness is not the order of the day. You pop out of forgiveness almost immediately, and move into deep understanding and compassion.

And so that's what I did with myself and my own past. I was, I realized, hopelessly lost. It's worse than that. I didn't even know where I was going. Conversations with God showed me that, and I responded with compassion for myself, born of a deep understanding of why I did what I did during those years past.

God, of course, knows all of this ahead of time. I mean, without my having to explain. Like the mother who comes into the room to see the child's face distorted with shame and fear and sadness and self-recrimination as he gazes at the shattered family heirloom at his feet, God understands all that has happened---and why. God doesn't have to forgive, because understanding erases any need to forgive.

Then, on top of this comes God's remarkable revelation that in any event there is "no such thing as Right and Wrong"! So if I didn't have sufficient grounds for self-forgiveness (or the lack of any need for it) through understanding why I did all the things I did, I now had an even richer awareness of Life Itself---its purpose, its function, its process, and its construction. That is, how it is put together. And this completely eliminated the need for anything even closely resembling "forgiveness."

Step One in being friends with myself and everyone I truly loved was complete! I could "let go" of all that guilt I had been carrying around. Yet I don't want you to think that I suddenly became cavalier about my past, and all the hurt I had caused. I let go of guilt, but I did not step away from regret.

Guilt and regret are not the same thing. If you feel into them, you'll know the difference. I will never give up `regretting' some of the things I've done. To do so would be to give up my humanity. But I have given up my guilt. If nothing else, I am "not guilty by reason of insanity." It was insane of me to think that I could find happiness doing what I was doing the way I was doing it!

With guilt gone, I felt better about myself---I was almost a person I really could have a friendship with. But I still had two more steps to go before I could complete that process...