Say I: Meet Me

These vignettes on friendships that you regularly run into truly are emotionally wrenching and should if one is normal tug at the heart and bring out very strong feelings. But sometimes one wonders if they are as real as they are presented and narrated. 

 Take this particular one on Friendship, for example. The picture: two loving souls in perfect harmony, basking in the bliss that each one exudes. The reality, as I perceive it: True friendship is a very demanding and exacting relationship, unless both participants are already equipped with the same beliefs, temperament, dispositions, awareness, etc; meaning, they mirror each other. 

 Unless true friendship is premised on two “similar” persons uniting together, it requires constant adjustments and reorientation. A constant “tug and pull” of the individual’s need to be this and the other person’s need to be that, the individual’s pining for solitude and friendship’s need for communication, etc . 

 While man is a social and gregarious being, I truly believe that a good part of him requires “aloneness” and true friendship which should hold no boundaries, can most of the time get in the way. If you ask what my take on this is. It is that while these provide good reading, one should remember that in real life, nothing much is that “cut and dried”. Everything in life requires a great deal of time and effort, a lot of confusion and real pain, with each individual contributing his yeoman’s share. With emphasis, on each individual. 

 If through my willful inaction or negligence, or reckless wrongful choices, I make myself poor and indigent; then I impose myself on the concern and goodness of the other. Rightly or wrongly, I make myself a liability, or a burden, to the other. And in the general scheme of things, each individual should carry his own rightful burden. For me then true friendship is not two individuals leaning on each other.

 Maintaining relationships of any kind is not only always serious business but is never easy. It can be close-knit one, like a family relationship, or a loose one like an email group. Still, there is always a degree of difficulty maintaining it for a variety of reasons depending on each individual person. It always requires much patience, adjustment, tolerance, and a host of things stemming from our own individual differences. 

 From my experience, the only and best person I can get along with, with nary a single complaint, is I. Without a doubt I can always rely on this a 100 percent. I need only lock into “myself” to find solace, comfort, and validation of what I believe in. And all’s well.