Friendship, a sad reality

Friendship: mutual affection, constant and active, between one person and another, born of a choice that takes into account the agreement of wills or characters, and of a long-standing familiarity.

How can you, or how would you want to, talk about friendship without starting from its meaning? As we normally do in this twenty-first century, you open Google, search for the word and find its meaning, and for the word friendship that meaning alone could be enough to explain what we live when we choose to share events and situations with other people.

That period of my life, made of beliefs and generalised currents of thought that I've now put behind me, had drummed into me that the more friends you had, the stronger you were: the so-called family, a place to take refuge and feel untouchable. Those same beliefs and that mental bombardment that marked my false maturity had led me to despise the concept of friendship and fall into a common way of thinking that went like this: your friends are the ones you have in your pocket, meaning the money you have to buy everything.

After all, it's clear that you don't live or die by friendship, but there are those who have built their lives on friendship, and those who have even built their company on friendship. Friendship can even be an evening at the bar, a beer together or a single, unique moment of silly conversation.

It's clearly impossible to think you are friends; being friends, instead, is very easy.

I don't know what idea you've formed of me regarding friendship, but I questioned myself on the subject and thought precisely of a man who tends to see friendship as strength, as power, as a company, as money. Yes! That man who ties himself to a figure and 99 times out of 100 will be disappointed.

Friendship is a very beautiful aspect of our life, but as I indicated at the beginning of this text, friendship is something that is BORN from a choice of AGREEMENT. It goes without saying, but we know very well that everything that is born is also destined to die, especially if at the end of the agreement of wills, characters and habits there is the word change.

By realising what the "earthly" concept of friendship is, I've managed to have a much more fulfilling relationship with my friends.

So the relationship of friendship is clear and is based on reciprocity, that is, on a will on both sides, which needs constancy, and for friendship to continue there must even be effort. But the nicest part is precisely that, beyond the choice one makes, there must be agreement of wills and characters as well as familiarity, that is, a constant way of acting.

How can you be friends with different characters, how can you form a friendship seeing each other only for a while, and above all how can you be constant when we get tired of something in an hour and want to move on to something else?

Better not to have friends?

The idea that could come out of these premises is precisely not to have friendships. Yes, because I look around me and consider who has remained my friend. Who, in reciprocity, is still a friend. And yet I have many reciprocal friends.

Friends, Reciprocity.

I have work reciprocity, social media reciprocity, walking reciprocity, reciprocity from meetings; I also had religious reciprocity, but in the end that too lasted a very limited time and was, to say the least, unpleasant. Oh yes, unpleasant, because it's yet another confirmation that makes me realise how Alive the Word of God is.

Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.

James 4:4b

Who among us doesn't chase a personal pleasure, whether it's the desire for a new car, a nice dress or anything else this daily backdrop has created for us? This is the concept of the world: going in the directions the "air" guides you, an almost surreal transformation into a flag.

Every interest pursued by chasing this spirit of the air surely brings people together in a moment of reciprocity, but breaks them apart when the interest ends.

Whoever is clear about the concept of the spirit of the air knows what I mean, and that's why those who are friends of this flow of interests concerning money, work, family and religion can't, in the end, be considered friends. Reciprocity ends when the interest ends. If you're not in my interest, I no longer count you. Some may call it "different choices"; I call it the end of reciprocity. The end of "earthly" friendship.

This habit of doing things out of interest and reciprocity makes us friends as long as things go well, but then we end up disappointing each other.

If you've read this chapter 4 of the book of James, you know what regret there is in thinking we can be friends today, but what I wanted to bring out is simply attention to friendship. A word so sold off cheap in everyone's mouth, but never truly made one's own.

Who teaches me to be a friend.

No man can teach you friendship. God can teach you relationship, and how does He teach it? By asking you to love others as you love Him. But how much do we love God, how disciplined are we in listening to the word of a Father? Let alone how we expect to be friends or love others.

If we wanted to learn the concept of friendship from God, we should find pleasure in giving without expecting to receive, but in this too we always fall short with bitterness.

The only scissors that cut through reciprocity are love and awareness. So loving those you know can disappoint you, knowing at the same time that we are no better than the one who disappointed us.

After all, this is what makes us smile and feel good with others, looking at each other calmly, since there are no teachers or pupils, tall or short, greater or lesser, capable or incapable, better or worse, but people and people, flesh and flesh, one and one, two and two, identical and identical.

Love without reciprocity. Unconditional love.

You are a cog at risk of jamming.