Friendship
It’s crazy to see many folks pride themselves as the one who makes their friends want to "level up" when things get better for them.
It is one of the many good-sounding-nonsense I’ve observed these days.
We can speak about how it’s arrogant to suddenly think your friends need some levelling up, 'cos your life journey took a fine turn towards something which might be good for you.
But it makes me wonder what the priorities of most friendships are today.
Maybe it’s just my ideal to say: life is not a race. A thing I’ll tell folks who say "it’s 2023" to mean that the old stuff should be left behind. All things cannot be sold on the altar of expediency. Or at least, they shouldn’t, ‘cos new doesn’t equate good.
Where are we rushing to? Most people these days are being chased by something they can’t identify. It’s crazy.
But I believe you can exist in your fine state of being while working towards a good thing—a goal that is true and specific to you without the rush to score something as soon as possible. Not all of us are meant to run exhaustively after a shiny objective. Just as the great artistes and artisans dwell in the moment as they create their craft. Even after making a lot of money. It just isn’t it. Most people will not be burdened with anxiety to “get it right” if they didn’t feel others are watching. We are becoming too covetous. Due to social media induced self-consciousness we imagine others are fixated on our lives, the way we are on the lives of others.
It’s disturbing to see friendship exploited for one’s social image. I mean, as something that has to fit into your personal aesthetic of what friends should look like. Especially without you considering what the said friends think.
This is why I’m not very quick to promote those who ask for friendship upon discovery of my flashy qualities; no matter how intense their admiration for me is.
It's too much pressure for me: you have to appreciate a specific value of mine —one which we both share in some way—to be my friend. I'm not in search of a “me” in another person. Our mutual understanding works.
It's better this way, 'cos now you're invested in me, in such a way that I can check your excesses and you can do the same for me. It's good for me. It's good for us.
People often miss this. I often meet people who strive to be great friends, but always get caught up with trying to say or do the "right things." Fooled by books on Networking, they try to make "intelligent conversations" at every opportunity. Doing anything, but being natural.
Friendship is not an oversimplification of the idea of a "shared interest.” Friendship is an appreciation of another.
It follows that if you consider me as a friend, you'll have to be comfortable with having some tea on a Saturday morning near a river in my Hometown, with the same enthusiasm as planning a trip to Monte Carlo.
I’m not going to feel the need to "upgrade” because of you. I work on the things that matter to me, at the pace and in the rhythm, which I understand to be necessary. I will not become hastily pressured in a bid to “meet up” with you. I do not move for anyone.
[Published first in 2023]