Friendship

Friendship Co-Curricular Lab | Taking Initiative

"The only way to have a friend is to be one." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Friendship” (1841)

This session’s readings and refraction video claim that friendship, though necessary for a thriving life, is often elusive. Marlyn Batista and Zack Imfeld offer their hope that friendship will be a significant part of your time at Notre Dame. Yet they warn that forming and growing friendships requires intentionality. Likewise, C. S. Lewis describes the common scramble among first-year university students to befriend others based on a desire to join the ranks of the influential and powerful rather than a genuine goodwill for the other. This week’s co-curricular lab encourages you to practice Imfeld’s recommendation that you “take initiative” in friendship not as a means of pursuing importance or influence, but as an intentional decision to be a friend to others.

Click here for a PDF version of the Taking Initiative co-curricular lab

Guidelines

1. Identify an acquaintance with whom you would like to cultivate a friendship or an existing friend with whom you wish to deepen a relationship.
2. Invite this peer to join you for a specifc meal, activity, or conversation. Recall Imfeld’s counsel to “have courage and take a chance.” If you are wary of taking initiative, then you may tell the person that you need to complete the exercise as a class assignment.
3. Your shared meal, activity, or conversation should last at least 30 minutes.
4. In your commonplace book, beginning on page 232 (or later), summarize your experience, connect it to the text from the Friendship session, and apply it to your practice of living well.