THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN COMPANY AND COMPANIONSHIP…

When you have a company, a visitor, a someone who comes over to spend a few hours with you breaking your rhythm for the brevity of their stay and henceforth you resume your cadence as naturally as if they had never entered your door, that is the definition of company.  If you noticed I did not make mention of sex nor imply there might have been any sexual intimacy characteristic to the sojourn of that “someone” at all.  I’ve decided to leave that dimension up to mystery as it is a gentleman’s prerogative and duty to maintain his amorous endeavors as private memoir between his beau and him.  More esteemed in the pecking order of social collisions is that which is occupied by one whom enjoys the distinct favor of being called “companion” not to be confused with husband, wife or any other nuptial entitlement but not to be discounted as a distinct possibility within that realm.  A companion is definitively a non-transient accommodation he or she is or would be an integral component of our life such that no plans might be made that did not take them into careful consideration.   A companion would not come into and go from our lives without remark, their breaths and ours would be paired as would our minds and souls.

When a companion leaves our presence they take a part of us with them and likewise they leave a part of themselves behind with us; and there is an invisible link that makes two people who have been fortunate enough to aspire to the rare status of companionship operate as one engine fueled by one another’s love. 

When company leaves our presence they simply are gone.  They and we quickly go back to lives that patently have nothing to do with one another save for the fleeting moments that arouse random memories but do not command continuous consciousness.  Our company and we share naught but the moment, we operate as separate engines fueled by reservoirs of unlike motive.

It is the nature of all human relationships that given the proper variables company may evolve into companionship and likewise a companion might degrade to the status of mere company.  One of the blessings and curses of twenty-first century culture is its freedom combined with its openness to transparency.  Freedom can easily migrate toward isolationism but in our time, perhaps as a reaction to a long history of restraint we interpret freedom as a condition that affords us the power to be completely open about ourselves as if to ad credibility to our nature.  So yes, we are free to do this and to do that but we will not allow what we do and whom we do it with to fall into mystery and speculation, we take ownership of freedom and publish ourselves as its living testament.

And how many years of human lives has it taken mankind to reach this level of freedom?  Nigh on 100,000 long arduous years of socio-political and sexual evolution it has taken mankind to realize his yearnings for freedom under the name of democracy and to craft a civilization that would protect freedom against the social backsliding of tyranny.  Well to mention tyranny and company and companionship in the sane paragraph is alarming enough so I will leave that discussion for another time.  Let me refocus on the profound difference between what we call company and what we call companionship saying only that we live in an unprecedented time of social freedom that allows us to explore both with whomever we desire and that we should not only understand the difference but appreciate the human effort entailed to get from one extreme to the other…

FIN

Bigdaddy Blues