Early Friendship

To my college Royal B Com class mates at NSS College, Nemmara

“Friends are friends forever”

“A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allow you to grow (William Shakespeare)”.

It was very easy for many of us to make friends when we were younger. We'd just walk up to someone, get introduced, start talking, and new friendship was created. During our college years, we became friends with classmates, college-mates, sports team members, individuals who were in the different student organizations, and students of different classes and batches. Those close friends saw us through our studies in college.

After graduation and moving out of town for either post-graduation or in search of lively hood we found that making friends is infinitely harder. It's no longer as simple as walking up to another person and asking them to be friends. While that might have worked when we were in schools and college, it doesn't really work after 25-years-old and definitely much difficult after 55 years-years-old. As adults we have turned our focus onto careers, marriages, home lives, families, children, and finally retirement plans.

Plenty of new people entered our life, through work, new relatives, children’s friends, and even through internet. But actual close friends, I will say are those made in college, the kind you call in a crisis and close to our hearts as they grew with us during our adolescence.

Friendships will enrich your life and improve your health. Friendships are, at their simplest, unions in which each person gets something of value from the other. Friendship is a relationship of mutual affection between two or more people. One key to friendship at any age is to find people who like to do similar things, think alike, and who have similar values and circumstances.

What friendship can bring?

Boost your happiness and reduce your stress.

Improve your self-confidence and self-worth .

 Increase your sense of belonging and purpose.

Help you cope with traumas, such as divorce, serious illness, job loss or the death of a loved one.

Encourage you to change or avoid unhealthy lifestyle habits, such as excessive drinking, obesity or lack of exercise.

 Help you in finding solutions to handle your sibling issues.

When family responsibilities and vocational pressures become less, friendships become more important. Among the elderly, friendships can provide links to the larger community; especially for people who cannot go out as often, interactions with friends allow for continued societal interaction. Seniors in declining health who remain in contact with friends show improved psychological well-being.

The digital world today provides us opportunities to be connected with friends through different mediums like Tele-talking, Text Messaging, Video/Audio chat, Email, WhatsApp, Face Time, and many more.

We all will realize that we have neglected to restock our pool of friends from school and college when we encounter a big life event : RETIREMENT! It takes courage and conviction for people to take the first step to re-establish the friendship of college days.

Let us all try to become closer, meet fairly often, keep in touch through Mobile and Internet, enjoy good times together, and get to know each other on a deeper level.

Good friend-ship will be there when life is hard to help uplift us as well to share in our good times and successes to come.

MVR Menon

Mob: +91 9445333388

Email: mvrmenon@gmail.com