Has your idea of what makes a good friend changed as you’ve gotten older?
Sometimes when I go to buy vegetables or fruits in the market, I recall that when I was a small boy, the vegetable sellers and the fruit sellers used to smile at me, as I looked at the variety of fruits and vegetables they had. They would always hand me a vegetable or a fruit, something that I could eat there. Now, here I was, a grown adult who still does not know how to smile to a child, especially in a situation like where someone known would hand me a baby and then everyone would look at me, waiting to see my smiling reaction.
I think that a part of me is still stuck in the past and on some level a part of my conscience still considers the children an equal.
I often think about how my outlook of the world has changed over time for the good or the worse. I am still an introvert, but I have found a way or two to interact more with the world. That is something required to sustain in this world, because no matter how much we think ‘I am fine on my own’, the time will come when you realise that is not enough.
Our first interaction with the outside world apart from family, it’s with the ‘friends’, friendly neighbours who are basically also family friends. We meet everyone’s friends, our friends, our sibling’s friends, our parents’ friends and grandparents’ friends and of course there are friends of friends. So, it is a big world full of friends.
Our friend, someone with similar understanding, sharing thoughts and hobbies of various nature. Having that mutual ground to stay connected, helping each other, spending long hours without many words spoken. Sounds a lot like marriage, but it is not for the obvious reasons.
There was a point, during college where there was a feeling that friendship the way it was back then, would continue for as long as we live. But the professional world has its own costs, that is where the magnitude of friendship decreases. As you age, you take on bigger roles, work more, find out you are struggling to make time for family, and one day it is like recalling a friend and wondering, ‘how much time has passed since the last interaction?’.
The idea of a friend for me still remains the same. Managing the time in life, that has become difficult with everyone busy in their own way. However, I have a feeling that when we reach an age of higher numbers, somewhere there, things might come back again, something of previous nature, like it did for my parents and grandparents, but till then it’s better to hang on to the sentiment without losing it.
Written by Anuran Chatterji
