Toast To True Friendship

My mail box has been semi-inundated with mass mailers on ‘Friendship Day’. Not with standing the clichéd criticisms of such ‘days’ being marketing gimmicks of many companies, I am slightly jolted out of my self-imposed ignorance and reminded of almost a void that exists in most of our lives as we change our geography, status or simply age – a void that only mushy warmth of friendship can fill!

Categorically not emphasizing the first word in the very popular serial here – ‘Sex in the City’- this beautiful portrayal of true, non-judgmental and fun friendship can make anyone who possesses such friendships in their lives thankful and those who had but no longer do nostalgic . For those who have escaped the omnipresence of this true blue New Yorkers’ tale of four girlfriends, it describes a friendship that is so mature that the sole trigger for it can be genuine care and love.

I have been lucky to have experienced such friendships- but unlucky to have not comprehended their full-blown importance till they metamorphosed into virtual interaction and the small, big or no conversations over zillion cups of coffee transformed into emails, instant messages and long-distance calls. Only when impromptu shopping sprees, endless teary-eyed movie-watching late night collective binging and for-no-reason male-bashing suddenly evaporated and were replaced by me with myself for most part of the day, did I understand that those hallmark cards for friendship day were not as silly as they sounded.

As I regretted missing one of the biggest changes in my closest friends’ life, I came across this line from Richard Bach that said ‘Can distance truly separate friends…..if you want to be with someone, aren’t you already there?’ The idea is as uplifting as it is deep. It brings one to imagine the immense possibility of freedom if we are able to simulate the entire beauty and security of a great friendship within ourselves.

Let’s break that down. The best part of having a true friend is to have a detached ear listen to you- sometimes to give objective advice but most of the times to just listen. What if we start listening to ourselves with equal detachment and compassion? So the next time in a crisis when we suffer from a total lack of rational thinking, we take the role of a compassionate friend to ourselves who can relate to each feeling we are going through but is not overwhelmed by the emotions and can objectively listen. As we espouse the role of the listener, we would soon find all the fuzz in our thinking eventually giving way to nearest semblance of logic.

Another big plus of an honest friendship is that it is non-judgmental. Irrespective of the ‘morality’ of your actions, a true friend never attaches labels to you. There is an echo of the same thought in spirituality- the highest form of attainment being self-observation without judgment. So to be a real friend to ourselves, the labels of good, bad, pretty, fat, intelligent, ugly, selfish, all have to be thrown out of the window- replaced by an empathetic observation of our actions minus the evaluation. The eccentricities, the moodiness, the unpredictability of action are all considered peripheral and ephemeral, as compared to the belief a real friend holds in the true core that is you. Re-creating the same belief in ourselves by us would generate an acceptance that would be many folds of what a real friend would have exuded.

A famous quote says that a friend is a present you give to yourself. As we work toward turning ourselves into our best friends, the presents would undoubtedly be endless. I am blessed with few unadulterated- goodness- personified friends who are all that I have mentioned above and much more. Here’s wishing a very happy friendship day to all of them and most importantly on this day celebrating the true friend that I have in myself!