Vipul Agarwal, Delhi, 4 August 2024
Generally, I don’t look forward to different days such as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and Friendship Day. It so happened this morning that while moving around in the garden, messages of friendship day started coming and that made me contemplate friendship. Friends are always very special because we get to choose them. They are not like relatives, who get tied to us along with our birth whether we like it or not. We choose friends based on common areas of interest and sharing. In schools, colleges, and workplaces, we get to know many people and something clicks with few people and we feel like sharing with these people. When we share our thoughts and life with these people, we feel that some of them are not able to appreciate while the sharing goes on with a few others over the years and sometimes friendship travels quite a long distance and we become comfortable sharing even the deepest of our secrets. Such a sharing results in the formation of a wonderful friendship.
I have many such friends and wish a Happy Friendship Day to them all. Some of the friendships travel far beyond sharing. When sharing becomes deeper, we develop some intuition, and whenever the friend is passing through a bad phase, we get some intuition. I have had many such occasions in life when a friend would call and I would say that I was just remembering him and wanted to talk to him or I would call and he would say that he wanted to talk to me and was just thinking of calling. When the friendship becomes this deep, not many words are required to exchange thoughts and feelings. What is unsaid and felt surpasses what is said.
While walking among the mango trees, I was looking at the birds. There are so many of them. Are they friends with each other? They keep fighting each other and yet stay together facing the bare nature and dangers together, ensuring survival, to have fun together. In the night, they hold each other tightly and sleep on the branches of the trees. I was wondering whether they have a sense of “I” similar to human beings. Whether this “I” in human beings deprives them of making friends? There is no doubt that the ego has a functional role of protecting the body, but have we taken it too far to create artificial divisions among human beings, and that is the reason that they are generally deprived of true friendship?
I have experienced in many of my interactions that when we talk to somebody who is quite egoistic, our ego too reacts more sharply. In a friendly discussion, where everybody is sensible and appreciative of different viewpoints, generally nobody tends to behave egoistically. However, when a person behaves egoistically, the chances of others also behaving that way increase, and that is the reason why generally in a group, the level of discussion tends to stoop to the lowest level of consciousness.
Probably, that wall of “I” or ego somehow melts between true friends. That is the reason why a friend would always be concerned about the well-being of the other friend, even if he does not like so. I am grateful to the divine for blessing me with friends who would not mind any argument, fight, or even slap me, if needed, if they genuinely feel that I am on a harmful track. Love gives friends immense powers over each other, which is used by the friends to force-correct the path of a friend. In friendship, the well-being of the friend is the only concern, and the rest all things are secondary. I do feel that ego and friendship can not co-exist. Friendship is not about expectations, rather it is about unconditional concern for a friend. I feel that it is the purest expression of love and compassion. A person can never love others unless one learns to love oneself. We are in so much of infatuation with the material world that we have stopped loving ourselves. Love with the self and clinging to money, power, self-image, beliefs, and sects can never co-exist. The second is just an escape mechanism to run away from the reality. Or we may say that the second is a very cheap substitute for the first. When someone learns to love oneself, he cannot stop himself from loving others. Any relationship that has love in its foundation, will always be fundamentally a friendship, whatever name we may give to that relation. That is the reason why friendships are so beautiful. They are not imposed but chosen. They are not based on give and take, rather they are founded on love. That is why they are as beautiful as love.
