I love Love. Intangible and sacred, it is the warm butter to life’s bread, making everything softer, richer, and infinitely more nourishing.

But it remains one of the things most difficult to encapsulate in language. This is partly due to its slippery, indefinable nature, but also due to the bluntness of language which English equips us with.

Owing to its derivation from Germanic language and previously Latin, its use of modifiers and context (i.e. romantic love, platonic love), and perhaps the traditional reservedness of British polite society, we only have one word – “love”.

Famously, the Greeks did much better, having up to seven different words for different forms of love. Where we would say “I love my wife”, “I love mayonnaise”, and “ I love my friend”, the Greeks would use different words for each context.

Agápē describes  selfless, unconditional love, like that of a parent’s for their child. Éros describes passionate, romantic love, which often gives way to pragma, which is a more enduring love, built instead on trust, compassion and deep understanding. And philia, which describes a deep friendship and brotherly form.

It is this last form of love – philia – that I’d like to talk about today.

Romantic love is fierce, all-consuming, and utterly delightful. A sublime cocktail of serotonin, oxytocin and dopamine floods through your endocrine system, leaving you wanting more and more and more.

Friendship is a different kind of love. Not driven by the tidal pull of lust, or the magnetic gravitas of passion, it is instead constructed on different foundations.

It is a love built on mutual respect, loyalty and companionship. Upon camaraderie, exploration, and shared understanding.

I am yet to know with first-hand experience, but I have a strong suspicion that one changes more in the years between fourteen and twenty-four, than you do between twenty-four and ninety.

Looking back, I can chart perhaps a dozen profound shifts of personality and self throughout this period. Different motivations, different fears, different values and different desires.

This is challenging. I recall causing and participating in a certain amount of emotional havoc throughout this period. Akin, perhaps, to a tornado navigating a path through the backyards of otherwise undisturbed properties, leaving destruction in its wake.

Friendships and relationships are fundamentally tumultuous through this period, with a continual process of reaffirmation required between your switching natures.

Of course, some friends and partners you cannot square your new selves with. There just isn’t that click, that spark, that understanding that was once there.

But friends who you remain friends with through those years, remain uniquely special throughout one’s continuing life. There is an enhanced deepness to your understanding of each other – born from a knowledge of each other’s foundational selves, that you have now shed like a skin.

You have been forced to continually reform your conception of who they are, and develop a tacit acceptance of each continual revision. Thereby, there is born a greater sense of trust in the friendship, and sense of being accepted exactly as you are.

I’m enormously privileged in having multiple friends whom I see in such a way. But there is no one that I do to a greater extent than Angus.

…

Over the last ten years, we have discovered so much of life together. Its delights, its lows, and what it is to lead a life that is fulfilled and meaningful.

It is a friendship that is boundlessly full of learning and discovery. As fully accepting as we are of each other, there has always been a constant game of striving to better ourselves and spurring each other to do so. What better really means though, we’re never quite sure.

He has, throughout this decade of formative discovery, always been somewhat of a sage-like presence. Only three months older, and in the same school year, I have always had the feeling that he has been significantly older than that.

The word cool is so subjective as to be almost useless. But to me, Angus has always been a very, very cool guy.

I remember distinctly his returning from his post-school travels to New Zealand, at a point where I had not travelled anywhere. Rolling up outside my house on his bike, he was wearing some Birkenstocks, a pair of shorts of an interesting fabric, and a loose, old graphic T. This image is the archetypal one of how I have always seen him.

Possessed of knowledge and experience far beyond my own; maintaining an understanding of life and how it should be properly lived. Always relaxed, with a perspective of the bigger picture.

His clothes have always sat with a relaxedness, that is entirely conscious but never contrived. He carries himself with a calmness, that very much represents his ever chill ying to my often hyper-active yang.

He embodies much of what I have often yearned to find in myself. In one’s teenage years, it manifests itself more as “I’d be much better off with a sprinkle of that in me”. A sense of this feeling remains into one’s twenties, but as self-acceptance increases, the desire for self-improvement gives way to a desire for learning and understanding.

I don’t think it’s presumptive to say we have taught and learned so much from each other. He has shared so much with me—loyalty, patience, inspiration, support, and kindness—and has helped shape me into a person I never would have become, were it not for his continued presence.

Alongside acceptance, camaraderie, and shared understanding, it is the continual discovery of newness that remains this friendship’s greatest joy.

Of each other, of new ideas, of new music, and new pleasures: fundamentally, new ways of seeing.

Ever prodding the other into doing more fun and cool things, we have had uncountable shared adventures together.

Adventures in teenage rebellion, in growing up, in becoming a man, in getting jobs, and in developing the various relationships we individually occupied.

Our united hunger for new endeavour has taken us around the world together, from Amsterdam, Portugal and Zante, to Washington, New York, and the Tour du Mont Blanc.

In November of last year, we made off for the most ambitious odyssey yet: a three-day trip to Denver, Colorado.

…

The East coast of America has a pervasive denseness to it. The cities are layered, the forests thick, and the mountains of Appalachia are countless. Teeming with activity and matter, one feels enveloped by the land.

The West of America, that I have thus far encountered, is the polar opposite. Multiple authors use the epithet “big skies” to evoke the feeling of the Mid-West, a phenomenon I hadn’t fully understood until sitting under such a sky myself.

When the early European settlers left the East Coast in search of the great West, they traversed much of the way across the country, before being perturbed by the enormity of the Rockies. And so was born Denver.

Denver, CO, is nestled in the bosom between the Rocky Mountains, and the incomprehensibly flat plains that precede them. Adjacent to Denver is Boulder, a town infamous for its hiking, biking and skiing. It represents a Mecca for those with a great love for the outdoors.

It was a glorious place. A dashing of snow lay across the mountains, and an unimpaired cyan sky soared continuously all around. The people were peaceable, and the whole place sang with an air of quietly confident progressivism.

Boulder, CO, is home to many excellent restaurants and bars. We’d hike all day, then schlepp it down in the afternoon to purvey the town’s many delights.

We laughed, we ate, we talked, we reminisced, we experienced, and we laughed some more. But man, what a mission it was.

We were staying up in the mountains, at a cool hostel in the middle of nowhere, and using the very-limited public transport to get to and from. A challenging task at the best of times, not helped by our lack of mobile data, zero research of the local area, and off-season timing.

Continually jetlagged, invariably ill (I had the good fortune of picking up a bastard of a cold the day before we left), always tired, and often hungry, we ought to have been a tinder box ready to explode.

Knowing each other so well is a dual-edged sword in such a situation. We largely know what the other is thinking, and thereby can foresee how any conversation around a disagreement would go. This makes it easier to push the detonating buttons or skirt around them should we so desire.

But given our psychological states, choosing solely the latter was a continually tricky task. Doing so required great patience, great compassion, and ever greater communication.

…

On our second, and final, full day we hiked from sunrise to sunset.

I honestly was running at 7% capacity, wheezing my way through a shaken rather than stirred cocktail of the aforementioned ailments. But so beautiful was the weather, so uniquely brief our location, that rotting in the hostel was of course never an option.

A stretching sun began the earnest work of melting the stubborn snow that remained, as soon as it cracked the horizon. Pines swarmed the landscape, emitting a sweet scent worthy of their dignified postures. The birds sang their first songs of spring, and alongside the path were the tracks of an animal so large it must have been a mountain lion.

We stopped often, needing to maintain the continual stream of ultra-high-fructose-corn-syrup to keep me going. As ever, we laughed throughout, drawing on the seemingly bottomless well of conversation into which we dip our pails. And we made some seriously fun and seriously stunning ground.

Not following a trail, instead just turning in a direction that seemed to make sense, we were guided through some seriously beautiful terrain.

Soon after midday, we descended off the back of a peak, into a low and dark valley. A place the sun could never reach, the boughs of the trees wilted under the weight of their snowy loads, and beneath our feet remained pillowy drifts. Silence smothered the forest.

We came to a fork in the path. Upwards, to our right, switch-backed a steep ascent of the locally crowning Green Mountain. To the left, swerved a declining path back towards town.

I was cooked. No energy, and no motivation for a few hundred metres of extra elevation gain.

“What do you reckon, Buddy?”, Angus smiled and whispered. “I’m not sure Buddy, I’m feeling pretty wrecked”, I smiled and whispered back.

There are few things as intimate as a whisper. So mellow and so soft. So kind and so gentle.

The sacredness of the silence, coupled with the emptiness of my internal energy reserves. To have asked in any other way would have been a defiling of both, an act of violence against the moment.

It was a sublime instantiation of love. One friend seeing another, and acting with the utmost compassion, understanding, respect and kindness. I loved him very deeply in that moment.

…

Of course we hiked up Green Mountain. Of course we were always going to. But that is beside the point.