deep friendship

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.

Solitude and Leadership – speech by William Deresiewicz

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.”

Aristotle

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.

David Whyte on the True Meaning of Friendship, Love, and Heartbreak

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.