Atongla Rothrong
Just the other day I met a friend, a not so friend, after a gap of I don’t know how many years. And the most embarrassing thing was that, I forgot to remember his name while he could recall all the silly childhood pranks I played on friends including him. After a lot of nerve wrecking re (coiling) of my blasted memory, I at last could place him. Well it all happened then so let me get back to now, as I look down in ignominy at myself for having forgotten a friend.
Friendship they say (whoever they are) takes time to build. Friendships require self-disclosure so any friendship has risks. Friendships require equality and loyalty. Friendships may not last. Friendships can lose importance and die gradually. Some friendships end abruptly with unresolved conflict. The worst enemy of friendships is change by one or both friends. There is usually pain with the loss of friendship. Friendships as well as all other relationships must have limits. You set limits with your friends because you care for them and your relationship with them, not because you don’t.
The effect of the indulgence of this human affection called friendship is a certain cordial exhilaration. In poetry, and in common speech, the emotions of benevolence and complacency which are felt towards others are likened to the material effects of fire; so swift, or much more swift, more active, more cheering, are these fine inward irradiations. From the highest degree of passionate love, to the lowest degree of good-will, they make the sweetness of life.
Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is necessary to write a letter to a friend, and continue remembering them— and, forthwith, troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words.
My friends have come to me unsought. They have been given to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent friends and lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths, and enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts.
It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space and only a small part on the reflecting planet.
I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily show himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass me by. Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, — a possession for all time. Nor is nature so poor but she gives me this joy several times, and thus we weave social threads of our own, a new web of relations; and, as many thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by and by stand in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers in a traditionary globe.
