Friends

It is very common to laud friends and their roles in one’s life. What’s more, you have numerous chain mails doing the rounds relentlessly in the virtual world accentuating the importance of friends. My post is not very far from being one of those chain mails describing the worth of a friend. Nonetheless, it is a post to honor my friends - in my own way.

Friends are not angels; they haven’t descended directly from the heavens; they have those similar limbs as we do, a similar heart as we do, lead lives similar to ours. But what makes them different from the rest of the people around us? The Mind! The enigmatic and abstract possession of every human being. It helps us identify “the friend” in a person. It is unique for each one of us and that is what sets apart a true friend from the crowd.

Friends teach you not to undermine you worth by comparing yourself to others. It is because we are different that each one of us are special.

They teach you not to let your life slip through your fingers by living in the past, but by living one day at a time and live all the days of your life. And how do they teach you? By standing like a pillar on which you can lean with all your weight.

When times are hard and the going gets tough, you go on mindless of the difficulties you experience and encounter, for the only reason that you know that there are a select few individuals who will stand behind you to hold you, when you make that occasional slip.

There are times when we completely lose track of friends. We sometimes wonder what they are doing and why we drifted apart. Time throws us into our own cesspool of routine that sometimes snatches away from us the regular contacts that we used to maintain with friends. But the day we re-establish those ties, it never is done from the scratch. Those back-slapping terms are but resumed and continued for times to come.

The term friend, as defined by the oxford dictionary is a “person usually not relation or lover; a person with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically one exclusive of sexual or family relations; sympathizer, helper; person who is not an enemy”.

In my dictionary, if you were to look up the meaning of “friend,” you would in fact be looking up the meanings of teacher, mother, father, brother, sister, counselor, helper, disciplinarian, agony aunt, philosopher, confidante, guide.

My friends are all these and more, rolled into one physical entity. I love them and I’ll cherish them as long as I breathe.

I dedicate this post to 3 very special friends of mine: Aparna, Dheeraj and Ajay.