A Toast to Friendship!!

One day you find yourself sitting and reminiscing about the incidents happening in your life… and the incidents of the past… and you start wondering…. where was I wrong?? Did I do something wrong or was it all the way it was supposed to be?? Are they all the lessons that I am supposed to have learnt from and moved on ahead?? Did I learn the lessons meant to be learnt? Or have I completely missed the point and that’s why such situations are repeating themselves in my life over and over again?

People all around me, the wise ones, the elders have looked at my pain and always advised me.. ‘don’t give so much importance to friends in your life…. they will give you nothing but pain’. I have always disagreed with them. I have never found more joy anywhere other than with a friend. But now I feel may be they were right! Because, I have also never experienced a greater pain than given by my so called friends.

That is what sets me wondering whether those people really were worthy of being called friends??

What do you do when you come across someone who you think matches with your frequency of thoughts? The answer is obviously want to befriend them don’t you? That’s exactly what I did. Then where did I go wrong?

When you are in a friendship you give your hundred percent to that friendship with intention of maintaining that friendship for the rest of your lives. And in return you expect the other persons to reciprocate the same(or is this where I go wrong?) isn’t there a chance that, that person completely takes advantage of your friendship and meanwhile pretends to be your best friend? So how are you to differentiate the good ones from the bad ones? Or are the signs very obvious but you are either very naïve or lets say purely dumb to know the difference. Either way you realize it only after that friendship comes to an end. And by then its too late,not to save the friendship but to save yourself from the pain. You realize you made the same mistake. Again! And again! And again!

So for refusing to learn from your mistakes you are sentenced to memories of pain, disgust(at yourself),and smirks of the people who think you are an easy target.

But for how long can you do the same mistakes?? Even the dumbest do catch on right? It might be late but its better late than never right? Or so you say to yourself!

What do you do then? You look back and reminisce just the way am doing now. That’s because you realize that all along the way there was one wonderful soul who has always been there for you. But you just like every Indian (who takes that’s there for granted and runs behind what is not there) blithely overlooked that friendly smile that was given when you were down, that call just when you wanted somebody to talk to, those words of reassurance just when you were thinking it’s the end of the road. And most importantly who stood right by you all through your misadventures in search for a ‘friend for life’. Never once complaining, instead, waiting patiently all along for you to finally realize.

I have realized. I have realized that I have such a friend. A diamond is always found in a coal mine. And you do have to mine a lot of coal to come to the diamond isn’t it? I have.

What do you do when you come across such a person? You make sure you don’t lose a friend again. Right? And wonderfully you find that with this person the feeling are reciprocated!!!

But the mistake prone you!!! What do you do? You take the friendship for granted giving excuses… saying that you do think highly of that person but your life is so full …. you hardly can make time to talk… but then one day you come across the words penned by that person specially for you!! And you have tears in your eyes!!! You realize you are doing the same thing others were doing to you. And you realize how hurt that person might be because it sure as hell hurt you.

If you repent for what you have done, then, all that is done is pardoned…

Now I can with total conviction reply back to those elders, and the wise ones that they were wrong. Friends do matter a lot. They don’t give you pain. They only increase your joy in life and everything around you. The only loop is that it works only when you find the right friend. I found mine. And am going to do everything possible from now on not to lose that person. And on reading this that person will am sure realize who am writing about.

Mind you folks am not talking of the love and the so called boyfriend/girlfriend relationship here. I am talking of the pure and clean friendship between 2 individuals. And yes such friendship can survive in today’s world!!