World’s Most Amazing Friend

- BY NEHA

It is relatively easy to make friends while growing up. Opportunities to befriend others come readily and aplenty during our growing-up years. Moreover, the opportunities to nurture those friendships - night outs, spur of the moment weekend getaways, late night phone calls – are also plentiful during adolescence, largely because of the abundance of spare time and energy we have.

However, as we grow up and enter into what the world calls ‘adulthood’, responsibilities pile up. We are required to adhere to certain societal norms associated with being an adult. Weekdays go by in the maddening rush of getting to work, meeting deadlines, scampering for back-to-back meetings and finally all we are able to do by the end of the day is exhaustedly slump into our beds. Weekends are the only two days left to catch up on our sleep, run errands, finish long overdue household chores and socialize. Yes, that is what friendship gets reduced to – SOCIALISING -  a brief chat over a cup of coffee, a quick meal or simply a casual phone call to say “hi, how are you doing?”

All through our schooling years, we read and hear how friendship is a beautiful relation. Friendship is perhaps among the few relationships, which are not thrust upon us by God or family, but which we voluntarily choose in our lives. Simply put, we decide whom we wish to be friends with. We share everything (well, almost everything) with our friends during our younger days - our secrets, our crushes, our dreams, our fears and so much more. Things we are skeptical of sharing with family, we can comfortably talk about with our friends. Even if we do not have the most like-minded or understanding of friends, being young does bring with it a certain amount of ease of candidness that makes sharing easier for us. As adults, we become so contorted in our thinking and rigid in our viewpoints, that sharing our innermost selves seems almost juvenile (read immature) to us. Deep down we all want an emotional sink in our lives - someone who would listen to us cry, ramble on and on about our lousy boss, whine about our messed up love lives. But adulthood requires us to get our “shit” together and not go wailing about to our near and dear ones.

Fortunately for me, adulthood has brought with it the most amazing friend I have ever had. A best friend is what we all have during our school and college days. I did too. However, it is only now, after being friends with HER for well over a year that I have truly realized what FRIENDSHIP is all about.

Not a day goes by when I do not feel happy and sincerely grateful for having someone like HER in my life. SHE is elated in my happiness, sorrowful in my sadness, non-judgmental in my imprudence and compassionate in my melancholies. What is truly amazing and awe-inspiring about HER is the way she successfully (and I know she will not totally agree to this) juggles the myriad aspects of HER being – SHE is a sincere corporate worker, a loving daughter, a great wife, a doting mother of two, an agony aunt for several, a close confidante for her cousins and for me - the ‘World’s Most Amazing Friend’.

She will be the first person to read this post and I can almost visualize her reaction and emotional response.

I just want to say this to her – YOU ARE WELCOME! :)