Friendship

Friendship is a complicated animal. It would be a fickle thing, coming and going as it pleases. Furry and warm, with claws and fangs. It is not a tame animal, that's for sure. I know that a lot of you would disagree with me and say that true friends are there no matter what. They are the most loyal of companions. At a younger age I probably would have agreed, but as time has gone by and i have grown older and more cynical I have seen too many events to support the opposite side of things. I think it is definitely a painful experience, but I do not think that it is a bad thing in the grand scheme of our lives.

When you reach your 20's it isn't only your life that starts to change, but the lives of all your friends. This is the time in life where the majority of people begin to get married and start families (I am not in this majority). Even if they are not doing those things, they are often focusing on their career. More often than not this is when friendships start to suffer. There are plenty of other reasons friendships end, people move, argue, unrequited feelings. Males in my life are notorious for ending friendships as soon as I decline a date. This is no form of bragging trust me. I think 90% of women have experienced similar losses of male friends. It leaves us thinking we are not good enough ourselves to be worth being friends with, our only worth to those individuals is solely physical or romantic.

Now at this point, all of you who would consider yourselves my friends are getting indignant. Don't be too offended there is a lesson to be learned from all of this. I think there are many reasons people tend to ebb and flow in and out of our lives like the ocean. I think that everyone we come in contact with can teach us something about ourselves, can provide us some good, or we can do the same for them. It is, in short, one of the ways we grow as people. We become more educated in our social selves, our moral selves, our character becomes more complete with each person we allow into our lives. That being said let me harp on something. I have never subscribed to this childish opinion that a person is only allowed to have one best friend. That one person is their bestestest and no one else is allowed to be in their lives, allowed to hang out with them or show them a good time. If you hang out with another friend it has a tendency to be received like committing adultery. If we find another person we would like to hang out with some people believe they are obligated to dump their old friends on the spot. The human heart is a lot like the stomach. The more people and love you put into it, the more it will expand and grow to hold it all. Except unlike your stomach it will not make you fat, it will simply make you a more loving, and amazing person. Now isn't that a good deal?

The second reason I believe we are all required to learn this lesson at some time is so that we come to understand where we are mortal creations fall short. People may have every intention of being loyal or being there for someone through thick and through thin, but as hard as we may try we will always fall short no matter how good our intentions may be. We do not have the ability to be the perfect person or the perfect friend. It is no longer a part of our nature. On top of that I think our world view is much to self-centred to ever be able to branch out into truly being there for someone no matter what. You will always gravitate to thinking about situations in the light of "how does this effect my life" not "how will this effect their life and what can I do to help." We can try, and some people grow better at this than others but there will always be slip ups along the way. There is only one thing in this life that will always, always remain faithful. I know what it is, what does your heart whisper?


I have the most wonderful friends and family in my life. I love you all crazy bunches. Looking back on my life, I'm so glad I am lucky enough to have each and every one of you. I love you with my whole heart.

When the odds are stacked against you...

Sometimes you are faced with those moments in your life when you look at the situation at hand, and realize there is no solution. I have found myself in more and more of those situations lately. I can safely say that they are quickly becoming my least favorite types of situations. They are not usually ripe with drama like confrontations, but are the slow burning kind of problems. It is very difficult to determine the best course of action in such situations. Sometimes you know that confronting the problem will only lead to more problems. There are some people that just refuse to hear, or refuse to be wrong. Trust me when I say having the ability to fess up to your mistakes is a enormously positive character trait. People being what they are, this is something that completely goes against their nature. I think our current government has a great problem with this vice. I'm not here to say I have never fallen victim to it myself, I have I am quite sure. I can be a fairly willful and prideful individual and it takes a lot of effort and five or six glasses of water to swallow my pride.

The whole problem has me thinking about human nature. If you have ever read any philosophy, or literature worth its salt, you will find comments everywhere through many works about human nature. The theories and feelings on the subject are as diverse as the writers themselves. There are two basic views, man is good, or man is evil. When I say Human nature I mean more specifically the human "State of Nature." Human "Nature" itself can mean a lot of things, are we animals like Darwin suggested? Are we spiritual beings? Or are we simply products of Nature? I think you all know where I stand there (Spiritual). I am not referring to those particular questions. I have been focusing on the idea of, if man is left to is own devices and decisions are the choices he makes innately good, or bad? Granted some choices (like about what to have for lunch) are neither. But a choice like, do you take your neighbors land to expand your own, or do you steal his crops because it is the easier way to have a full belly are good or bad. I happen to hold the view that men with no guidance or rules are innately bad. We are self-serving and lazy. If you would like to say, well I'm just not that way at all, I am a good person, I would tell you to reinspect your motives for being a "good person." There are thousands of variables that go into why a person believes what they do about human kind and how the behave in a state of nature. I highly recommend that is something you should research and develop your own educated theories about. As people we have the ability to know a lot of things inside and out. We struggle endlessly to understand ourselves. It is more difficult to understand a thing or situation when you are in the midst of it than when you are observing it. I feel the same about these conundrums I find myself in, perhaps I cannot find a solution because I am caught up in the midst of it?