Making and keeping friendships

In all the languages of the world nothing is more beautiful than the language of love and friendship. Love is often fickle and unpredictable, but some friendships grow and deepen with time. We go through life as collectors of things and people we encounter along the way. We are lucky when we find real gems in our acquisitions because they have proven the longest staying power. Friendship is not quantitative but qualitative and the latter is proven only after the endurance of time while going through life's phases of fortunes and misfortunes.

Many successful people are sorrounded by friends who love to be associated with success, fame and money. This is all natural as bees are lured by honey. One gets a supreme feeling of security in having so many friends celebrating every event of achievement. Yet how many stay when times get bad. How many are there to comfort a friend who lost a loved one, someone who is suddenly stricken with a terminal disease or who lost a fortune because of bad business decision or because a well-paid job became expendable.

There is a distinction between acquintances and friends. Many acquaintances are formed in workplaces, during travels and brief encounters in different places. It is a parade of passing faces where there is no strong impulse to further a relationship to the level of friendship. Somehow, somewhere in the heart there is a tiny voice that says when a person could become a lifelong friend. Unlike love that sparks with passion, friendship is rational and comes with a good feeling of liking and of seeing the prospect of a friendship that will endure.

I cannot count more than five people that I consider to be my true friends. (This is outside my family where love and friendship, along with parenthood are strong bonds that connect our lives.) Do I consider myself poor that in all my years of working, travelling and meeting peoples of many colours and creed, I should end up with a handful of people I am confortable to call my friends? I am sure that outside the magic number I have right now, there are others who have been good friends at one time or another. But they didn't stay. Worst, time has imposed a barrier and there was no attempt to bridge that distance. A few very good friends in media have passed away and that has left some emptiness.

To be a friend has some demands of keeping the relationship alive, that it is nurtured and never left to the vagaries of humour and weather. There are not so many occasions for reunions with old friends especially when many have busy lifestyles and families. But when a reunion takes place in one's home or in a restaurant for dinner, it is guaranteed to be a happy encounter of fun and laughter fuelled by stories of adventures and misadventures from some decades back. There is the never-ending tales of the heart, of love affairs that had no closures, of poverty in school allowances, of being exotic foreigners with black hair in a population of blonds and blue eyes.

It is true that we went through the hard years of learning to survive in a foreign country, of mastering a new language and culture and of absorbing the best there is without losing our own identities. We've known what it is to be poor students, to compete for excellence and to grow wiser in the choices we made along the way. "We were so poor then, but we were happy"! And I asked: "And today... some 35 years later, we are a little richer, we had successful careers, met and married good men and have children whose world is more different than the one we had some decades ago. The friendship that started then has grown richer from sharing life's many situations. And the best part is that, we can laugh at all the mistakes made without losing pride. #