“The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.”~ Epictetus
I discovered this simple truth the other day and despite its simplicity it is one of the most profound statements I’ve come across in a while. To follow this advice you needn’t be hardhearted, you just need to be willing to be governed by common sense and brave enough to choose your company carefully.
Bad company is addictive, but not for the reasons you might suspect. As you’ve probably experienced, keeping company with those who challenge you to rise up, to do better, to give more (in life and online!) is not always comfortable. It involves pressure. Bad company tends to sympathize with your weaknesses and encourage the expression of your faults, which strangely enough can be more comfortable. Bad company leaks the pressure that would otherwise compel you upward.
Who do you turn to when the pressure comes on, when you feel down and out or when you feel badly done by? Someone who will sympathize with your grievances and provide ready agreement with your complaints and accusations or someone who will say to you that you are not a victim and that you can rise above it?
The person you choose to place at the other end of the line of your call for help will either weigh you down or lift you up, help you to contain the pressure that allows for the birth of something new or leak it out.
Choose wisely.
Gregory Hake 
Great quote & useful elaboration. I’m enjoying your blog!
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I love Epictetus! Great quote, especially updated to include online connections. As much as I wouldn’t keep bad company in person, I don’t want it on my twitter or facebook accounts either.
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So true!
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Whatever finds residence in our hearts will seek complementation, or it must cease to exist. When we then find ourselves seeking agreement for some sort of ill spirit, as you suggest, we are presented clearly with a fact in our hearts. Either to seek agreement for that destructive spirit or to fight with it will feed it. the only sensible alternative is to acknowledge it and let it starve! Yes, that may be momentarily uncomfortable, but it is one vital way to let real purification occur, the other being the active seeking of complementation for what is true and beautiful. A simple pathway to profound experience!
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That easily is the definition of friendship today, and you can see how people define their friends differently as an expression of their own aspirations. Even if this realization comes to you late and you find yourself in the midst of wanting to change your definition, you can inspire your friends to think about you differently. Hearing their problems and then always looking to constructive solutions to overcome their own impediments without judgement is a good place to start; also presenting your problems to them and asking what they see they can help you with in finding solutions that you cannot see for yourself, or their opinion about your own character in that situation. A true friend you will find does not judge you, and has the ability to talk frankly and respectfully, bringing in a fresh perspective that can help you successfully navigate the landscape of your life as you increasingly give them your trust by virtue of the example they provide to you of their own living. That’s why you trust them right? Because you’ve seen the decisions they’ve made and you agree with them in their essence. That’s the quality you are looking for in your own decisions, and so they become a trusted companion.
The force of gravity is always at work, and I’ve seen over the course of my whole life that uplifting friends will draw you upwards in excellence, where friends who project their own limitations on the important things in life will tend to draw you downwards on the things that matter to you. If things don’t matter to you, well, that’s a whole other story where this discussion really has no relevance.
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My mother used to say “water seeks it’s own level” but I’ve realized you can change your level. It’s a matter of wanting something greater in your life. Greater peace, happiness, fulfillment and being the best you, you can be.
The peculiarity about the “comfort” of low flying friends is they are really “frenemies”. They will turn on you when you are the only prey around. I think that might be where the watch your back comes in.
The point is if we want to rise up we have to stop the slow leaks in our lives.Something to really think about, thanks.
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