At our book club/fellowship group, the room was a bit too warm, and we were all united in our dislike of the book and its message. So we kept going off on tangents, and for some reason P. and I kept getting more and more giddy, with increasing hilarity, laughing until we cried. T. saw the humor, I think, but not everyone else could.
People are usually quite casual in calling someone a friend; it often means some superficial areas of agreement or interest and ease or convenience of association. Sometimes it merely means non-enmity. Among good or close friends, there can be strong areas of shared or overlapping interests, and active enjoyment of each other's company, non-goal-oriented conversation, etc. (I think of this as good "friend chemistry.")
But every now and then, you run into someone who is exactly on your wavelength. Even if you don't know each other that well or hang out that often, there can be a kind of resonance -- like a kind of wave pattern that is constantly reinforced and builds in amplitude until bridges break or glasses shatter. A more scientific-sounding explanation of resonance: "When the crest of each wave matches the crest of the next as its returns, resonance occurs. This happens at the first harmonic, which is also known as the fundamental frequency."
It has puzzled me for a while, why I think of P. more as a sister than a friend, but maybe the resonance concept explains it -- my brother is the prime example of someone who is literally on my wavelength in the same way. Tuned to each other's natural frequency, he and I have at times triggered seemingly inexplicable hilarity in each other in extended freewheeling riffs, leaving onlookers frankly mystified.
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