Eating Salt Together

NOTE: I’ll be on vacation for a bit, so look for the next issue around Labor Day.

This article could also have been titled, “Men and Friendship.”

I recently joined my merry prankster friends for our annual bike ride in Minnesota. We’ve known each other for 45 years.

Men and friendship are a good but rare thing.

This is a report from the field, not a complaint. I’ve watched it my whole adult life: men reach sixty with a resume, mortgage, tools in the shed, and no one to call at night. We had friends once, part of youth’s territory—dorms, jobs, leagues, army. But as we move through life, our focus shifts to work, and if we find friends there, well, great, but do those friends move beyond the job cycle?

In Minnesota, eight of us, in unflattering spandex, argued about the route. We met as college kids working at a church camp north of Los Angeles in the late 1970s. Now, we have aching backs, surgeries to discuss, and adult children. We ride, complain about the heat, eat big lunches, and around the third day, someone finally comes clean with a burden they’ve been carrying since we last met.

I used to think that last part was the spiritual one. The honest conversation on the side of the road. I’ve changed my mind. Bike riding isn’t just a container for a spirituality of friendship; it’s the whole of friendship that is spiritual.

Salt, and the People Who Remember Us

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses three types of friendship: utility (based on benefits), pleasure (based on enjoyment), and good (based on love for the person himself). This shows how seriously the ancients valued friendship. I covered this in my book Weird Wisdom for the Second Half of Life. However, I overlooked the most important point Aristotle makes: friends, he says, must first eat salt together. He means literally that sharing meals and time are required to truly know each other. Some translations say ‘consuming a bushel of salt,’ about a year’s worth of meals, before calling someone a friend.

Forty-five years is a good deal of salt.

He also says a friend is another self. Not a mirror, not an accessory, not a helpful resource. Another self. Aristotle thought a person could not see his own life clearly or contemplate his own actions from any useful distance, and that a friend solved this problem by standing where you cannot. You learn who you are by watching someone who is both you and not you live in front of you.

Sappho, centuries earlier, on an Aegean island, explored similar themes from a different perspective. Only fragments of her work have survived. In one fragment, she predicts someone will remember us across time. In another, she gently consoles a woman leaving by recounting their shared memories of the flowers, garlands, and soft beds—as if offering tangible mementos for her journey.

On the one hand, Aristotle says a friend lets you see yourself. On the other, Sappho says a friend carries you. If both are true, and I think they are, the friend is the one who holds the memories and experiences with you. When my memory of my own twenties goes awry, and it does, Mark or Kurt recall it as it is. When I misremember myself as braver than I was, Rick is right there with the correction, delivered with real affection and zero mercy.

The Third Rider

Centuries later, after these Greek thinkers, Aelred of Rievaulx served as abbot of an English monastery with several hundred monks. These monks had taken vows of silence and chastity, deliberately avoiding close attachments. The monastic tradition was cautious about friendships. Thomas à Kempis would later explicitly warn against forming particular bonds. He was concerned that favoring one brother over others could bring political complications into what was meant to be a monastic paradise.

Aelred went in an entirely different direction. His 12th-century book Spiritual Friendship opened with a picturesque scene of him sitting quietly with a companion. He says, in a Zen-like manner, “here we are, you and I, and Christ makes a third between us.”

A third. Not a supervisor, not a chaperone. A third friend in the room.

“No medicine is more valuable, none more efficacious, none better suited to the cure of all our temporal ills than a friend to whom we may turn for consolation in time of trouble, and with whom we may share our happiness in time of joy.”
― Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship

Later in the book, Aelred does something that could be quite heretical yet is wonderful today. He takes the famous line from the First Letter of John, God is love, and swaps a word. God is friendship.

The whole argument of the book rests on this phrase. Friendship is the very substance of God, showing up between two people who have known each other a long time.

Which means my Minnesota gang could be a gaggle of monks living out a vow of mutual friendship with that third rider pulling along in the middle of the pack.

Half, and Then the Whole

In the Buddhist tradition, we have something quite similar. There is a short exchange in the Pali canon in which Ananda, the Buddha’s cousin and ever-present companion, who is a bit of an enthusiast, comes to the Buddha with what he clearly believes is an excellent insight. He says: this admirable friendship, this companionship with good people, seems to be half of the holy life. The Buddha tells him no. “Do not say that, Ananda. Admirable friendship is not half of the holy life. It is the whole of it.”

The term in Pali is kalyana-mitta, the admirable or beautiful friend. It is a technical term in the tradition, not a sentimental one. The beautiful friend is the one whose company changes what you become and who you are.

Aelred says God is friendship. The Buddha says friendship is the holy life. Two distinct traditions, arriving at the same conclusion.

For years, I told people that friendship was a doorway into the spiritual life, that God could be found at picnics, tailgates, and ballgames. But I can now see that I was keeping God on one side of the door and my friends on the other.

Aelred pushes it further, God is friendship. The Buddha claims true friendship as the totality of the holy life. Aristotle and Sappho pushed friendship to a mutuality I had missed.

On one of our riding days in Minnesota, somewhere on a county road with the corn up on both sides, one of the guys pulled alongside me. We exchanged tales of lost and unfulfilled dreams along with the celebrations we’d experienced. We rode. He talked. We laughed. You could say, we were praying as we rode.

More to Come, (after vacation)

James Hazelwood is a writer and photographer living in New England.