Friends.

There were a lot of beautiful things I saw in Italy and Greece as a supervisor on my son's school trip, but the one I can't get out of my mind is this marble sculpture on the grounds of the Acropolis in Athens. Damaged by time, headless, it was still a beauty: two figures seated next to each other, one whose arm is thrown over the shoulder of the other, their backs to me.

I didn’t have time to find out much about the statue, nothing really. I was just passing by and it would have seemed like ninety-nine other amazing things I saw that day except for one thing. It stopped me in my tracks because it spoke one word so loudly without a sound: friendship.

That’s art.

Think about that. An artist captured the concept of friendship, of caring, of compassion with chisels and rock. An artist manipulated a chunk of marble into body language so strong that one could instantly recognize that these two figures are friends.

I stood there with so many questions. Who were they? Why did one need the comfort of the other? What motivated their comfortable embrace? If they were to come to life what would I hear them whispering to each other? So many questions, yet only one answer: friendship.

No wonder Aristotle, perhaps even inspired by this very art, said, "the antidote for fifty enemies is one friend."