1.a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard.
3.a person who is on good terms with another; a person who is not hostile.
Tonight as I sit here pondering upon a trip to Melbourne I will make soon, I begin to allow my mind to wander upon what sort of trumped-up bender we may be embarking upon; myself and the chosen few that are coming with me on this voyage into the unknown.
This leads me to the line of thought that we'll probably end up having a few drinks, live it up and go a bit crazy in both the Melbourne city centre and probably the small area of Mornington we're staying at. This leads me further still to what I think I'll talk about now - that is, what exactly are these people we call our friends, and what exactly does it take to be one, in our modern, sleek, sophisticated world.
For now I'm going to reflect on what a friend has meant to me, and perhaps how it's changed down the years.
In high school, your friends were the people that you saw every day for much of your waking hours for six years, and that you knew the best and generally you all were part of a large group of friends that mostly got on well.
Over the years you picked the select few to be your 'inner sanctum' so to speak. As part of this, you may have disregarded a different number of people because they didn't live up to what you saw as fit to be your friend, or your inner sanctum didn't like them, or maybe you simply didn't connect with these people in the same way anymore, due to a multitude of reasons. By the end of it, I think, you end up with a fairly defined group/troupe/clique with which you identify/share common experiences/enjoy what the world has to offer.
So, with this group you left school, confident that you would remain as firm friends for the rest of your years.
As a wise man said to me, remember that your number of friends will deteriorate over the years after high school finishes. A year after school finishes, you'll have 15 mates that you'll still see fairly regularly. Five years after school finishes, that number might have dropped to just seven or eight. 20 years after school finishes, you'll be down to four or five, if you're lucky.
I know for my own case this effect seems to have held sway even more quickly than I imagined. I've seen people disappear from my life more quickly than I thought possible, some permanently, others sporadically returning. It seems these days friendship can be turned on when a person we knew enters a room, all the usual decorum we used to share with them be retrieved from the depths of our memory, used for a number of hours, and extinguished again once they walk away back into the ether of commitments, events and work that we call modern existence. To me, this indicates that there is a certain shallowness in this human experience that we call friendship.
I extrapolate, furthermore, that a lot of people merely identify to each other as "friends" because of a common attractive force. People are pulled together by school, university, sporting teams, but once this force is released, the particles, the people, fly apart as if they were never held. People actively seek another destiny for themselves, pushing themselves away from what they knew, for different reasons; people drift apart slowly because of the lack of a common calling; and a few try to cling on to this flagging feeling of connection.
I don't know what the answer is. Am I even asking a question? I think in the end, that I've lost sight of what a true friend is.
In these days, it seems that a friend is just a person from our recent past that we catch up with occasionally and sporadically, and not always in the most conducive of circumstances. Perhaps this is the best we can have in the years ahead. We then have 'acquaintances' that we meet, but resign ourselves to perhaps never really forming a connection with, or perhaps we may. Maybe it's up to ourselves to define our own destinies in the ways of friendship.
