My Friend Steve: A book and blueprint for living
What are the ideal qualities you look for in a friend?
For me at the ripe age of just over 33 and a third, a friend is someone who:
Encourages you to think and see in new ways
Holds you to a higher standard of thought and action
Inspires you to iterate and grow
Friendships
Anyone who has talked to me about the time we lived in California has heard me mention the most wonderful couple that we met in our time there - Steve and Suzanne Cowan. They are the epitome of cool.
Steve recently published a book of personal essays - A Common Uncommon Life. He describes his motivations for writing this book as adding his own to the shelf of life.
I enjoyed the book in its entirety - some of my favorite chapter titles:
Meetings with Remarkable People
Seven Days in Greenwich Village
The Magical Mystery Tour
Belief
Just under half of the content of the essays are dedicated to his friendships; explicitly in chapters like Meetings with Remarkable People and Best Friends, and implicitly in his chapters on his collaborations, his dogs and his wife.
Steve writes about the evolving concept of a best friend and what concentric circles of friendship have looked like in his life.
My friendship with Steve differs from most other friendships in my life, namely because the majority of time we spent together in person was 45 minute intervals on weekdays in the backyard of an elementary school that unofficially doubled as a dog park.
Alejandro and I had the pleasure of sharing a few dinners with him and Suzanne, and another couple from the dog park at their respective houses, and in the past years we’ve kept up through email correspondence.
Notable passages from the book:
“A remarkable person (in the context of these writings) can be a great friend, a mentor, both or neither. It is important to make that distinction. The common thread was that each remarkable person pushed me in a new direction, for my benefit alone…In retrospect, my happiness was the sum of the changes these people had brought into my life.” - pg 76
Describing his father as “a voracious reader and resourceful dreamer” - pg 77
In his essay on Paul Friedman, “Paul once told me that there’s no such thing as good writing - only good rewriting.” - pg 83
Something I have found painfully true recently as I’ve started to put my own pen to paper (which is really finger to keyboard, phone, or typewriter, realistically).
In his First Impressions of Greenwich Village, “The club was a typical coffeehouse of the 1960s and early 1970s - lots of intellectuals, philosophers, musicians, and derelicts.” - pg 201
Are there still public forums for thinkers to gather?
Steve spent a good amount of time both working and playing music at the Red Herring Cafe during his years in Champaign-Urbana and just from his stories it felt like a place that held a bit of modern magic. One story goes “One person dreamed of walking along a beach at night and placing a lit candle on the sand, while another person (on the same night) dreamed of walking along a beach and finding a lit candle. Those two people told their dreams to me, and I knew they’d not contacted each other, because one had arrived in town that morning.” - pg 210
Upon graduating university “I walked out of that empty classroom and into life.” - pg 230
In his conclusion titled A Few More Words, “Time passes slowly when you have lived less than half of your expected life, but after you pass that imaginary halfway point, it’s as if you’ve crested a small hill and are suddenly careening down a mountain. What used to feel like a week now feels like a day. At 73 years of age my ambitions are still those of a 40-year-old-man. There is simply not enough time to finish what I’d like to finish - or to meet all the people I’d like to know.” - pg 396
Lessons Learned
A few things that my friendship with Steve has taught me through our in person interactions and our continued correspondence living roughly 5400 miles apart:
Journaling Daily
Steve has kept a daily journal for decades which comes with benefits both in the present and the future. Writing daily helps you better process the happenings and emotions of the day and gives you a record of life to revert back to at a future date.
Though he shared this recommendation with me in 2019, I only started to keep a daily log in 2023. I’ve been fairly consistent but have missed a few days here and there. I have a specific daily journal that comes with pages pre-dedicated to each day of the year.
In addition, I keep an additional freeform notebook where I do longer journaling when it suits me. Sometimes I make several entries here a month and sometimes a few months go by.
This is also where I keep a collection of ideas: descriptions and sketches of paintings that I like at galleries, ideas for paintings I may want to create one day, ideas for essays I might write.
Pursuing Many Hobbies
Steve has pursued many varied hobbies throughout his years including:
Co-writing and recording and performing The Ship, a contemporary folk Opera, in 1971
Playing in multiple competitive volleyball leagues in both Illinois and California
Training his dogs to understand upwards of 100 commands
Participation in a formation dance team in the late 80s/early 90s
Creating a stained glass Tiffany Lamp
Co-founding his own Systems business when tech was just starting to boom
Attending hundreds of concerts throughout this life
He notes that since moving to California in 1976 he began developing friendship by doing things, rather than by talking about things, as he had done in Illinois.
In the past years my hobbies have really been reading and painting, and the way in which I practice each is mostly in isolation.
I did participate in two art events this year where I met some friends who I have spent time with since then but can certainly make more of an effort to expand my horizons in terms of passions or interests pursued as a way to expand my circle.
Taking Action
While there are many many lessons one could learn from Steve, the last one I will cover is taking action.
When he moved from Illinois from California he took action to meet new friends by joining a new volleyball league. He took action to learn to invest himself to ensure that are protected throughout retirement. He and Suzanne contribute to organizations that they believe have impact like the arts, animal welfare and social justice. The volunteer within their community and he takes time out to write letters to encourage people to vote.
Inaction is often the easiest path in life whether it be learning a new skill or trying to drive greater change for what you believe in.
I really like that Steve and Suzanne take action.
In a recent email exchange recently around some of the ideas we had for respective pieces we were writing. I really appreciated the way he ended the email:
"We both come up with ideas, you and I, that bare value in pursuing.
Got to go now. Keep typing!”
P.S.
I got a sneak peek of the book in September 2022 in the form of a visual chapter outline. Though the final version changed slightly, this outline had inspired me to start writing.
With Steve’s permission I share this artifact of his planning.
I also really love seeing people’s handwriting! In a world of digital communication, handwriting gives a stronger sense of a person on the other side.
