A couple of days back while discussing with my friends we hit upon an interesting subject. The point of focus was one of us and the argument was mostly directed at the person. The gist of the idea was what struck me the most. The premise was that most of my friends shared their ideas, problems and daily events to one of my friends who is an amazing listener. What they felt was that it was unfair that they never got the opportunity to return the favor. This person felt that the idea of bothering someone with his/her problems would simply waste their time (and would not interest them).
I wont go into where the argument swayed and what we learned about ourselves but rather I will use this opportunity to tell you a story from my life that is pretty similar, which I have been waiting for a while to narrate…
Sometime back I was very close to a specific friend of mine. We hung out a lot of the time and spent a chunk of it talking about things. I had slowly grown to recognize this friend as a “best friend” (a concept that I find a little hard to grasp now). As we spent more and more time together I slowly told him about ideas and secrets that were personal. It wont be wrong to say that I thought his opinion about things were important.
As time went by I slowly began to realize that he never shared his ideas with me unless I asked him personally. Ironically in the naivety of age I thought the best way to solve the problem was to divulge more thoughts and prove that I treated him as my closest friend. I guess over this time he began to understand me probably better than I understood myself, yet he never voluntarily shared anything important with me.
Before long I had given up. This friend was perfect in almost everywhere, he would go out of his way to help people, would listen and give a honest and clear opinions and would encourage and warn you at the right moments (the list is long so I will stop there).Yet the only flaw I saw was that he did not see me as someone worthy of being trusted with a secret. I just told myself that he wasnt the talking kind and stopped pursuing it.
A little time later during a random conversation with a common friend I was told about an important piece of information about my friend. The idea that he hadn’t talked to me about it and had discussed it with another friend stung me. I think I was a little heartbroken that day… It was in that moment that I wondered if he ever considered me a friend.
I realized that day something that has stuck with me till now. I realized that “there are two types of relationships in life. One the kind you want with any person(friend, parent, spouse) and Second the kind of relationship you have with someone”. The beautiful and perfect relationships fall right in between the two. Most of the time we spend working hard to make a relationship that we “want to have” and forget to see the relationship we have with us at that moment.
I think that philosophy made me stronger. It was one of me earliest realizations and paved way for most things that happened to me later in life.
A few years later we had slowly started spending lesser and lesser time together, before too much time had passed we hadnt spoken in months. We remained in contact thru common friends and occasionally spoke to each other too. One day in another random conversation with another friend I was told about what my friend had said about me. I was taken aback by the idea that he still considered me one of his closest friends. It was only that day that I realized what I truly had meant to him.
What I realized in the end was that we were both good friends who had chosen to express their friendship in very different ways.
We all choose our scales to measure people but what if our scales are flawed. What if we are too worried about other things that we think are important that we forget the things that are actually important.
What I have realized from life is that we are built to expect more or expect nothing. When someone regularly disappoints us we tend to slowly expect nothing from them and when someone keeps impressing us we push our expectations higher. This isnt a great system but it is our system. What we have to realize sooner than later is that there is limit to push expectations and more importantly realize that pushing it higher than that limit will only make things worse.
Looking back its easy to say I would have wanted to do things differently… but the fact is if it wasnt for what I chose to do I wouldnt have written this post :)