Came across some
recurring themes about friendship in different articles that I was reading. I
have had such “deep friendship of intimate conversations” from childhood to
now, but none of it lasted lifelong. I have had friends whom we never thought
we will ever drift apart (no blood pact or anything). There could be many
excuses – of moving, different schools, college, locations, people moving away for
better life conditions, long distance friendships not sustaining etc. I have
been steadily losing friends – most due to people deciding to move abroad
(typical Malayali syndrome), getting restless in their jobs and wanting a
change and then it becoming hi-hello once in a while. Idea of a life-long true friend
is alluring.
But I’m talking
about one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate
conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one other person. Not Skyping with
three people and texting with two others at the same time while you hang out in
a friend’s room listening to music and studying. That’s what Emerson meant when
he said that “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a
grander self-acquaintance or solitude.”
Then,
there’s the true friend. Not someone who’s just like you, but someone who isn’t
you, but about whom you care as much as you care about yourself. The sorrows of
a true friend are your sorrows. Their joys are yours. It makes you more
vulnerable, should anything befall this person. But it’s hugely strengthening
too. You’re relieved from too small orbit of your own thoughts and worries. You
expand into the life of another, together you become larger, cleverer, more
resilient, more fair-minded. You share virtues and cancel out each other’s
defects. Friendship teaches us what we ought to be: it is, quite literally, the
best part of life.
FRIENDSHIP is a
mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us
see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only
with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find
it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. A friend knows our difficulties and
shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our
triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them. An
undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental
form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All
friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without
tolerance and mercy all friendships die.
No comments:
Post a Comment