Evolutionary

Being there for someone is a colloquial phrase we use all the time. Being a shoulder to cry on, showing the flag, or being there for support, etc... Doing these things can come so naturally in our actions towards others. Friends are down and we want to pick them up. A loved one needs something and we get it for them.

It’s strange, a bit, if you look at it biologically. According to evolution and Darwin, our first instinct is to watch out for ourselves and survive and try to make life easier for our personal gain. Yeah sure, we're concerned with the survival of our species and all, but that is more of a sexual consideration rather then a caring concern. I mean I don't know about you, but I don’t think about reproduction when I’m trying to help my friends out. According to science, we're supposed to be cold competitive creatures. Those of us who are weaker, who need the shoulder to cry on, are the bottom of the natural selection bunch according to history. Our first instinct shouldn't include saving or helping those 'helpless' people in our lives.

And yet time and time again we do amazing things as humans, like overcome our instincts. We even build new ones. We change our reactions so that we are kind and considerate instead of cold and competitive. We build unlikely relationships and we learn and expand even more through these. There’s the real evolution- empathetic evolution.

And it’s such an intense emotion that causes this new evolution. It starts with the recognition that right now, in this moment, you are a factor in someone’s life that makes it better for them somehow... Happier, fuller, safer, Better. You are that person’s life support, in a way, and that’s even more than being simply a shoulder to cry on... And it's these relationships we find ourselves in, I think, that we find in any moment, we really are playing said role; and the shock of the anti-instinctual yet amazing  evolutionary and emotional bond both delights and frightens us. This is what friendship is, I think. To evolve, maybe not as a species, but as a person. To love somebody for something not animalistic, to love them for purely non-sexual reasons and to love their happiness and safety simply because they are and we are and we exist together in a harmonic way that sometimes can’t be explained further than 'feeling right'. It’s not for self-betterment, and while I think it can involve the aid of others, it’s not entirely that either. They simply make us happy. It’s these friends, that watch our backs and lick our wounds and lay with us and cry with us and love us and it is beautiful.

Do you have these kinds of friends? Does it ever hit you that what you are to them, and/or what they are to you, is something beautiful and rare? Let me know!

See you when I see you,
A.