Friendship : Overlapping of Life

In the age of social media, the possibilities to reach and connect with people across the world has multiplied . The possibility is unpredictable. We can have friends from pre-nursery school, intermediate school, tuitions, college, work and not to forget the family friends and relatives. We add friends at the click of a button, keep them updated with your latest tweets,photos,status updates, check-ins,upcoming trips and all, the networking options are almost limitless. As the number of our virtual friends and followers multiply, have we ever wondered, how much of it is really “real?” What does friendship actually mean to us? 

I'll tell what friendship means to me. I made my first friends at the age of three , after my parents sent me to school.The bond that was built is getting intense with age. I have a wide variety of friends, hundreds of friends all over the place, but that’s different. The bond that I have built with real friends – I always thought it was absolute. But over a period of time, with the experience of life, I realized there are very few people who see friendship like that. Most people see friendship as context-oriented. When you are in school, you have one kind of friend. When school is over, you just drop them and pick college friends. When college is over, professional friends, and whatever else. That’s how people look at friendship. Troublesome for me to understand. 

My need for friendship has never been too much. Friendship, I always thought it was for good and in every way absolute. I've found good friends here and there, but even for them, as life situations change, their needs and their focus on the friendship changes. For me it never changes. It stays as it is. It is disappointing that most people cannot form deep relationships in their lives. They can form relationships only according to their needs; they cannot form relationships beyond their needs. A relationship just for the sake of relationship, that is not there in most people. They form a relationship when they need it; when they don’t need it, they break it.

I am a big idiot in such matters. Even now if I meet an old school friend, I still approach him the way I knew him at that time. But he is somewhere else, no longer the way he was. Probably they move on with life and I don’t. I have always stayed a little outside of it. I valued life that way, so I always kept it that way. I think it continues to be so even today.

The life process opens up all its secrets because of the bonding that I form with whatever I came across with. Even in touch with a simple inanimate thing,there is a certain relationship. Friendships also means the same thing . Those few moments that we shared with someone, not necessarily just in terms of emotion – but somehow knowingly or unknowingly, moments of sharing were moments of uniting and becoming one in some way. I never saw sharing as giving and taking; It is sharing of two lives overlapping each other. 

Perhaps my idea of friendship is too old-fashioned, or I don’t know if it was ever in fashion. Maybe it is a little silly, maybe it is not socially savvy, but in terms of life, I think my ability to bond with anything or anyone deeply – whether it is a tree, a place that I sat upon, a piece of land, a rock or people – has in many ways been the key which has opened up dimensions of life and nature to me.

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