Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Word of the Day: Symbiosis

sym·bi·o·sis
A close, prolonged association between two or more different organisms of different species that may, but does not necessarily, benefit each member.

You'll have to excuse my befuddledness for the remainder of this post. They are vacuuming what seems like the entire square footage of this office. I haven't slept in at least a week thanks to the chanting going on next door. And I was verbally assaulted this morning, leading to a less than fresh and exciting perspective on the world.

Todd suggested I use this word today. I text messaged Timoni something really important over the weekend which she happened to receive while at dinner with a boy. Knowing it was rude to do the cell phone thing in the middle of a date, she also knew she couldn't *not* text back because it was a very important matter pertaining to the person she spends more time with than anyone on the earth, who was in need of consoling. That might make her a bad date, but a really exceptional friend. Todd suggested that ours was a rather symbiotic relationship, but upon closer inspection, it isn't because our friendship is mutually beneficial for many reasons. We do have a close, prolonged relationship though. If you wanted to determine how many hours a day we spend together, it would be more advantageous to just count the hours we're asleep and subtract that from 24 to get the answer.

I learned this week though that something that I had invested a lot of time and energy in and thought was mutually beneficial turned out to be the extreme opposite. That was made very clear to me in a less than compassionate way and tore down a lot of the beliefs I had that people are, in general, able to live together in harmony. What's the purpose of building a life where you are constantly at odds with the people around you? What I want more than anything is "world peace" and I really mean that. What is wrong with us as a people that many of our relationships are symbiotic disasters? Why can't we all just get along?

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