Enriching friendships
Time. Where is it all gone? I don’t seem to find traces of any of it all. Here I am feeling I’m on a crazy roller-coaster ride whizzing with its swoops and panic-ridden thrills, and a formidable to-do list extending into the near and far future. Mundane and ambitious. Today here I am, doing what I wanted to. Art, decor that televisions and
magazines love to flaunt. An accomplished wish list (almost). And ‘friends’. I know so many ‘right’ people. I air kiss so many famed people over the evening filled with ‘parties’ who become instant ‘friends’. Sounds like a dream world?
A recent work interaction brought me into contact with a street-smart twerp who I found made every friend with an agenda. His life is about periphery-ing around the celebrated and ‘rich’ and “influential” and the “arrived”. One needn’t be horrified. He verbalised it, but it is a sign of the times I think in a greater or lesser degree. It sometimes seems a world where no one cares about anybody. Cynical? I hope so!
Travelling along the work and success way did I stop to take time out and nurture those friendships that I came across along the way? The people I so enjoyed and care for. I’m wondering somewhere along the line the definition of friendship seems to have changed. Wasn’t it about caring and sharing and enjoying the company? Mr Wordsworth you should be living in our times, you’d certainly have cause to lament ‘what is this life if full of care’. No time, no space, no emotional accommodation, no encumbrances.
Friendship is not getting extinct to be sure (that would be an apocalypse of another type). Sociologists are putting it in as a fading concept of relationships. Is it becoming so that you need a ‘how to’ manual to get into a thing that used to be so natural that even babies knew it without being taught. You went into kindergarten and sat next to a girl. She peeked into lunchbox and you bopped her on the head with your aluminium bag and became friends for ever after.
It’s time to reckon investments of a more enriching sort. For the many lovely people I’ve met on the way to here in my life that I’ve been hoarding in my ‘love to hang out with’ list. I’m remembering best friend times from long ago.
Life is not meant to be such a serious business I’m sure. In fact, one step further, if we exclude people on an emotional quotient, except at a functional level, we are being irreligious. Religion teaches interdependence, love thy neighbour, family and all such caring that takes one out of the ‘selfish, brutish and short life’ that existence is otherwise.
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