Dear Zoe,
Today I would like to talk about friendship.
I think your mother would be a better speaker on this topic as her longest standing friendship as of now had been 18 years and still going strong as I’m writing this, but hey, she’s such a camera-shy person, so here I am writing to you instead.
C.S. Lewis wrote that, “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another ‘What you too? I thought that no one but myself…” and I totally agree with him.
We are bound to be friends with people who are similar to us, whether that similarity is physical (being in the same school, church, or neighborhood) or psychological (sharing the same values, roles, etc).
When the similarity ends, the friendship usually will also end. This is because the ‘unnecessary’ nature of friends. As C.S. Lewis again wrote, “I have no duty to be anyone’s friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself.”
Unlike marriage, you don’t have a ceremony to celebrate the forming of friendship and unlike a business partnership, you don’t have a contract to back up your relationship.
But friendship will make your world a richer place. My college would be dull without friends and Semarang would be a horrible place to stay if I have no friends.
For long, judging by the unnecessary nature of friendships, I thought that friendship like those you see in the TV show Friends (a popular show in my time) is just a myth. But it all changes when I got to know your mother and her friends.
Your mother like to hang out with a group of girls they call the ‘aubergine gang.’ She’s been friends with them since she was 15 years old and they have survived heartbreaks, long distance and motherhood together.
As I observed their friendship and pondered how they behaved to one another, I finally saw a trait they shared that made their friendship lasts: they make their friendship one of the most important values of their life. When one of the member of the aubergines gang arrived in town (some of them lived in different place), they make time for each other. When a friend was in need they will not hesitate to spend their resources for one another.
The way to make friendship last is to make your friend or friend(s) a value in your life. The more the people, the harder it will be to maintain the friendship. You have a limited time and resources on Earth so you can never be friends with everyone.
Zoe I hope that you will find your aubergines gang