We Should Not Be Friends: The Story of a Friendship

by Will Schwalbe

He wanted to be guiding but not leading. The whole idea was to come up with experiences that would fully engage young people and make them partners, not observers. He was guided by a saying that he couldn’t get out of his head: “What I hear, I forget. What I see, I remember. What I do, I understand.”

Maxey had helped me realize that people you don’t like aren’t always who you think they are, even when you are quite sure—and what’s more, even if they are, they may want to change.

Then we all sing together the Bahamian national anthem, which is actually a beautiful song—not about war, like ours, but about lifting your head to the rising sun, pledging to excel with love and unity, marching sunward even though the weather may hide treacherous shoals, and finally reaching your God.

I wondered if there was something I could have said that might have given some comfort. I was supposed to be the words guy, and I’d always believed that I could find the right ones. More and more, I was discovering that, just as Maxey’s body was failing him, words were starting to fail me. I was beginning to think that, no matter how much I trusted the power of language, there were situations in which nothing I could say would make things any better—and that what I said might even make things worse.

And at home, in the United States, it didn’t take much to see that a backlash was building with the rise of “religious freedom” bills devised to claw back some of the rights that had been won.

I remembered a line from Brideshead Revisited when Charles Ryder, the narrator, says, “Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.”

I wanted to be more like Maxey. I wanted to stop caring quite so much what everyone thought about me and instead just be satisfied when I was doing the right thing. I wanted to do more—really, anything—for the environment and creatures. I wanted to be bolder.

Donald Trump had just been elected president. I had been a passionate Hillary supporter. Maxey was terrified of Trump.

The whole Island School is about learning to be present where you are, and to appreciate not just this special place but every place—the whole planet.”

Pages later, I came to a passage in the book that connected our querencias: “If we feel wisdom is lost, we need only enter a library. We will find there the records of hundreds of men and women who believed in a world larger than the one defined by each generation by human failing. We will find literature, which teaches us again and again how to imagine.”

The students who were alone when they were approached thought the hill was very steep, while, surprisingly, those who had been walking with a friend thought it far less so and guessed it wouldn’t be arduous to climb, even with the backpacks. The study revealed something even more surprising, I told Maxey: “The longer the friendship, the gentler the slope of the hill seemed to both of the friends.”