02apr06

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in -- Robert Frost

THE great pianist Oscar Levant said he had no trouble with his enemies. "But my goddam friends . . . they are the ones that keep me walking the floor at nights," he said.

That rings true. Whoever said friendship was easy obviously never had a true friend.

Real friendship is about dealing with the good, bad, ugly and indifferent.

Recently, a friend I have cherished for years walked away after I hurt him emotionally. The hurt wasn't intended, but that wasn't the point.

You see, I wanted him to make changes in his life -- changes I thought would make him happier.

I forgot real friendship is not about making those sort of judgments. I forgot we have to honour and respect our friends' decisions because they are not ours to make or to judge.

Friendship is the strangest and greatest thing in the world.

Good friends are people you can share your secrets with, cry with, laugh with and commune with.

They don't judge you or make you change. They accept you exactly as you are.

As friends, we share something in common and are tied together by our memories, tears, laughs and smiles.

A friend is one who knows us, but loves us anyway.

Listen to Mark Twain. He said: "The proper work of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right."

A great human longing is to be close to other people, yet we so often take friends for granted.

Writer Anais Nin said each friend represented a world in us -- a world possibly not born until they arrived and it was only by this meeting that a new world was born.

Friendships sometimes seem unhampered by racial, religious or social differences. Friendships can cut across accidents of place and time.

There's always a danger in opening ourselves up to others. Avoid closeness with friends and you will never be in danger of being rejected.

No matter how good a friend is, they are going to hurt you once in a while.

Then again, medical studies indicate good friends are more important than fulfilled ambitions.

Medical subjects with greater social support are thought to be less susceptible to colds.

Lack of friends and close family are seen as stronger risk factors than stress, lack of vitamin C and smoking.

Friendships shape who we are and who we are yet to be. They soothe our tumultuous inner world.

Scientists suspect hanging out with our friends can counteract the kind of stomach-quivering stress most of us experience on a daily basis.

Aristotle identified three categories of friendship -- utility friendships, where people are useful to each other, such as boss and employee; friendships of pleasure, when you enjoy doing something together, such as playing cards; and friendships of excellence, when you love the person for who they are.

Thomas Moore wrote that every relationship that touched the soul led us into a dialogue with eternity.

But the typically busy, involved in a religion of rush, network a host of acquaintances, but few friends.

FRIENDSHIPS are governed by magic rather than by rational laws, as Kahlil Gibran expressed in The Prophet: "Your friend is your needs answered. Without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unacclaimed. Let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit."

You don't have to always agree with someone to be a friend. It's obvious that two people can look at the same thing and see something totally different.

God leads the way on this. I believe he loves us not on the basis of merit, but with grace. It is freely given love and doesn't come with the demand that, in order to be loved, humans must be something impossibly different from what they already are.

As friends, we should understand that our friends' dreams are not necessarily our dreams.

As acclaimed American lawyer Bernard Meltzer said: "A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked."

Bryan Patterson

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