FRIENDSHIP

Notes of Concern…

                               …Jackson Blair

FRIENDSHIP

All through life we build a tight circle of friends.

From the time we are very young playing outside with our childhood friends through all the excitement and activity with the high school or prep school friends, on into the world of work or the years of college and university friends, the names of those near and dear are added, and occasionally subtracted, from the group we call “our friends.”

Certainly there is a degree of “trial and error” in friendship. First impressions are not always right, and experiences can change the depth of friendships. So as we travel through life, the strength of our friendships is tested.

Often circumstances cause us to move from place to place. With each move comes a whole new prospect of adding friends and the sadness of possibly losing some friends from the past.

A very significant part of this building of a group of serious friendships is the realization that you are not always the arbiter. From time to time, someone you consider a friend ceases to see you as his or her friend.

I think the goal is to arrive at the end of life with a small group of tested and true friends, folks who have been there in good times and bad. This small group of friends has shared experiences, some of them decades in the making. These are men and women who love you even with all your faults. They can be counted on to support you under any circumstances. And, more importantly, they know they can count on you in the same way.

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"Friends are the Bacon Bits in the Salad Bowl of Life."
- "Pizza Place Sign"

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I remember reading somewhere that if a man reaches the end of his life with two or three really good friends, he is blessed indeed. Obviously, in that statement I think he is referring to two or three really close friends. It presumes we all have a much larger group of less close but important friends in our lives.

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"The friendship that can cease has never been real."
- Saint Jerome

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Maybe with the start of a new year, it is time to take measure of your friendships, to identify those individuals who enrich your life, those for whom you would go the last mile if needed, and to resolve to see more of them, share more of the life that is left to you with them, and to daily consider what their friendship needs might be.

The wonderful thing about best friends is that you need not name them. They know fully and happily who they are.

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"I'd like to be the sort of friend that you have been to me. I'd like to be the help that you've been always glad to be; I'd like to mean as much to you each minute of the day, as you have meant, old friend of mine, to me along the way."
- Edgar A. Guest