I was talking to my friend Gahmya, and she was talking about when she was in the Peace Corps, part of her responsibilities were to teach people how to wash their hands and during this time, they may not have had hot water. She was talking about she had to teach them how to wash their hands because hand washing is so important. It helps stop pandemic, it help stops the spread of germs. It just keeps you clean. It keeps you from being infected and reinfecting people. It's just very important but one of the words she said when she was talking about teaching them how to wash their hands, she talked about if they didn't have hot water and most times they didn't where she was and so she talked about the friction of washing hands, the friction of rubbing your hands together, close and doing it fast and rubbing your hands, the friction of using your own hands to warm up the water to help kill the germs but for whatever reason, that word, friction had been hanging on and lingering with me for a while. I started thinking of how we hear about iron sharpens iron and this friction and iron sharpens iron and then this conversation I've been having about connection and this conversation we're having about our friends.
Our friends and the people that we engage with and allowing those friends to be friction, allowing those friends to be part of the process to clean you up, allowing those friends to be part of the process, to sharpen you and make you better, make you more impactful, to be able to cut both ways and to be able to be sharp and using those friends to make you a better version of yourself and that was something about that word friction that just lingered with me and bumping up against our friends and not always agreeing with our friends, but knowing that that friction makes us better. It's not always about agreeing. It's not always about having the exact things to say. It's about having the friction of friendship to make you better, to make you sharper and stronger and even a little bit more resilient but that comes through having those connections and being able to use your words that could communicate, not just even with your words, but with your body, with your mindset, with your hugs, but something about that word friction just really got me thinking in iron sharpens iron and is that what your friends are for? Is that how you're using your friends? Are you that friction for your friends and are your friends, that friction for you and knowing that you're not going to always agree, but knowing that those friends are coming from a place of love and do you have friends or are these just people that take taking from you or are you guys in a true give and take relationship?
