Friends

FRIENDS

Who is not a friend?

The guy at the grocer's shop the other day said: everything in this world has to be simply experienced and left behind. That was a statement out of his heart and perhaps he wanted to share his inner feelings with others. As one expresses their inner feelings, they seem to assume that the environment is friendly.

That statement for me was a gesture to communicate and bring out a relationship out of an acquaintance.

How acquaintance to friendship is a process, a cycle in its own! Developing an acquaintance into a friendship, and further setting a bond and building a wider, larger family.

Can life be without friends? For some it may be a smaller, closer circle with common likes and preferences. For others, it may be a wider group with diverse likes, tastes or preferences. Whereas the first lends an ambience of comfort to take the life's stress out of you, the other adds newer dimensions, ridding one from the bonds of definitive and the adhered.

Yet you must have friends.

Mind is so compelled by the fresh and the new, wanting engagingly to shift from the usual, understood and defined to unexplored, unknown and the inquisitive. Unavoidably and unquestioningly it is set in that direction.

Friends are beyond definitions. It is not just comfort. Or, trust. Or, reliability. Or, even the helping hand. At its core they simply provide a window to a larger, wider world: beyond a need.

Friends are beyond books and learning. They help you question and challenge the known, defined and accepted. In that endeavour they help you test the new and unattempted.

Lending warmth and help is perhaps just the beginning of a friendship, meaningful and valuable.

I have found the greatest hurdle in the mission to reach out and expand is an instinctive feeling, or shall I call a scare:  Oh, how would I be able to cope with so many and several. That however becomes a precedent just when you pursue the course with another mission: "I will see how I can. First, let me reach out and strike a rapport with the one I just met."

That mission to set the mind beyond opens up an unlimited capacity. And soon you begin to enjoy that.  When you meet someone so drastically and distinctively different from you, and you see, recognise and appreciate a character that you never considered a resourceful one in your own acceptance. As you see that work for another better, you make an attempt yourself to work upon that. Wow and behold, that works for you as well, and very soon better!

Friends relay a whole mechanism of trials and experimentation. As you do that, you begin to absorb newer ways and abilities. Over time as that expands the skills and capabilities, you grow out of the old. The melting pot in you soaks the new with a revived sense of pleasure, and the challenge to work upon the unknown and untrusted diminishes.

You are not alone as they say. And the world is big enough to a variety, diverse and wider in character and depth, borne out of multiple learning, culture and societies.

What else is life? If it is beyond family, career and goals, it is about friends. It is friends that expand one's world and set greater and bigger missions in life. Making life a continuous journey towards attaining the new and building upon the learning!