I read some inspirational words “Every day is a new life to a wise man.”
Recently my oldest son drove from London Ontario to Vancouver with his two housemates that he lived with for a few years. As anyone knows traveling across Canada on a seven day road trip can test any friendships patience and tolerance. I was glad to see the boys arrived in good spirits. Sometimes there’s dynamically different desires in what people want to see and do.
I have several different types of friends. I have some of my most high contact relationships with work-related friends that have a shared interest in. Some friends I speak to on an almost daily basis as we share challenges and problems and we help each other with mutual counseling. I have some old but golden friends that I don’t talk to very much, but our long lasting friendship developed through the heat of various challenges but I’m equally close to them if they were ever a need, I’m more than happy to serve and help in any way possible. There’s a saying” A friend in need is a friend indeed” and that Echoes a lot for me.
There are friends that care about you and friends that want something from you. For the ones that want something from you, I am happy to help. I sometimes want help from a friend also. Some people view this as using each other, I disagree, and I view it as kind friends helping each other. A few hundred years ago people needed friends to survive. There was no medical system, so if you got sick your friend would help you build your house and your friend would be critical to your survival if you had no food. My favorite kind of friend is the one where we receive mutual benefits by teaching and helping each other to grow up better. There are also intolerant friends that can be very volatile. Even if you invested 20 years into a friendship, they are ready to walk away from friendship on any misunderstanding.
Intolerance and lack of forgiveness is more common now with friends. We now live in dense cities but live more physically isolated lives in our box apartments looking at the our screens in our own mental world’s being entertained by television and cell phones. Connecting through social media apps is perhaps a way for people to connect and keep in touch. We probably do not need friends to survive like we did need a few hundred years ago. In some countries that I visited people are either sleeping on the subway or looking at their smart devices but rarely look up to smile and make eye contact and start a conversation.
Loyalty and friends is super important I believe when someone invests tens, hundreds or thousands of hours with somebody communicating writing talking it’s an investment in building a friendship and it’s also unfortunate when that friendship is lost or dissolved. I often try to reach out to people that I haven’t spoken to in a long while. I only remember not reaching out to 2 friends. That’s because they were too unable to tell the difference from fact or fiction and didn’t not want to change.
I also realize that like customer satisfaction in service I also like to make my friends happy – it’s very enjoyable to help friends when it’s possible. True friends never take advantage of that fact.