Click the link to learn more, readers! And remember: when selecting friends, choose well and wisely. Good friends are worth more than their weight in gold.
Friendship: 4 Things ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ Can Teach Us
We need fellowships for our own “quests,” too.
Saturday, March 3, 2018
In The Fellowship of the Ring, the hero Frodo has to journey to Mordor to destroy the Ring of Power, a metaphor for (you guessed it) power itself.
Our own quests may not be so dramatic. We might just want to find a good wife and raise healthy kids. We might just want to start a company, or master a sport, or produce a great work of art.
But regardless of the size of our ambitions, we’ll still have to grapple with the very big and very real thorns every human experiences: power, evil, lust, pride, anger, fear, tyranny, dishonesty (the list goes on). Like Frodo, we will find enemies who don’t want us to succeed in our “quests.”
We need fellowships for our own “quests,” too.
Fortunately for Frodo, he is joined on his quest by a group of powerful strangers and friends knit together by a common cause of defeating the dark lord Sauron and destroying the Ring. They’re (as you might have guessed from the name) the Fellowship of the Ring.
We need fellowships for our own “quests,” too. Unfortunately, we probably aren’t the best at selecting them.
Accidental Friends and Fair-Weather Allies
Unbeknownst to us, we have sleep-walked into many of our friendships. We have met friends at school, in college, at a job — our built-in social environments. It’s easy to just accept our friends’ friends and connections as they come into our lives.
It’s no wonder — many of us are trained from an early age to “be nice” and accept friendship from anyone. We rarely put up resistance or exercise much selection, especially if we’re “nice” people.
A Song of Joy by Caroline Furlong 