Wednesday, December 06, 2006 Friends connection By Henrylito D. Tacio
A COUPLE of years ago, an English publication offered a prize for the best definition of a friend, and among the thousands of answers received were the following:
"A watch which beats true for all time and never runs down."
But here is the definition that won the coveted prize: "A friend -- the one who comes in when the whole world has gone out."
Charles Spurgeon, a noted American commentator, once said: "Friendship is one of the sweetest joys of life. Many might have failed beneath the bitterness of their trial had they not found a friend."
What fun would life be if we had no friend to share it with? No one with whom to celebrate our successes, share our laughter, confess our disappointments? Friends, indeed, are an essential ingredient for a full, happy life.
Following are some tips to help you make and keep them:
1. Make friendship a priority. The people who always seem to have good friends are those who deliberately place friendship high on their list of priorities.
2. Be a friend. Ralph Waldo Emerson had it right when he wrote: "The only way to have a friend is to be one." Often that means taking the first step and initiating deeper contact with another person.
3. Practice the art of self-disclosure. Nothing bonds two people more closely than self-revelation. When you take the risk of sharing with another person things that bring you joy and pain, the friendship deepens considerably.
4. Celebrate differences. Often the closest friends have as many differences as they do similarities. The finest friendships often cross religious, political and social boundaries as people discover there can be great unity within diversity.
6. Give love and support. A good friend is always someone who can be turned to when life gets rough. In difficult and depressing times a real friend suspends judgments and provides a continuous flow of love and support so that the other person can heal and recover. C. Neil Strait, a well-known American author, forwards: "The greatest service one can perform is to be a friend to someone. Friendship is not only doing something for someone, but it is caring for someone, which is what every person needs."
7. Be loyal. A recent survey published in Psychology Today, an American publication, revealed that loyalty is one of the most desired qualities in a friend. Loyalty, someone once defined, is "faithfulness, and effort, and enthusiasm. It is common decency plus common sense."
8. Don't expect perfection. A friend's moods may change. A friend may make decisions you do not feel are wise. And a friend may act in ways that you would not. Nevertheless, strong and true friendship does not have a high perfectionist impulse attached to them.
9. Forgive and forget. Sometimes friends hurt us through a word, a deed or by neglect. If the friendship is real that person will sense the hurt caused and will give us an explanation or an apology. Rather than crossing the person of your list of friends, forgiving and forgetting is in order.
10. Listen with your heart. More than anything else, so many people need others to hear them when they are hurting. This means hearing beyond the words and withholding judgment. Poet Marian Evans, writing under the male pseudonym George Eliot, had a friend who was able to listen this way. Evans wrote: "Oh the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words but to pour them all out, just as it is, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keeping what is worth keeping and then, with the breath of kindness blow the rest away."
11. Be affirmative. Look for ways to make the other people feel good about themselves. Be sincere and generous with praise and compliments. Friendships thrive and people grow in an atmosphere that is positive. Dr. McGinnis writes: "If you train your mind to search for the positive things about other people, you will be surprised how many good things you can observe in them and comment upon."
Finally, friendship takes time, energy and commitment. Yet it is always worth the effort. Goethe said it all when he declared: "The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here who thinks and feels with us, and who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth an inhabited garden."For more Philippine news, visit Sun.Star Bacolod.
