Growing up, I always thought there was such a thing as perfect friendship. To me it had to exist because, well, I knew deep inside me that I could be a true friend, with all the ideals that come with the true meaning of that word.
I quickly realised that the few friends I was making along the years just didn't share same enthusiasm as far as true friendship is concerned. But I was stubborn, and I gave people more chances than they deserved, till my threshold of forgiveness was reached and I began to change the way I saw 'friends'. People will call themselves friends just because they hang out together, share a laugh or odd story together, take the same classes, have the same hobbies, get to cry over each other's shoulder from time to time when neither is too busy to be selfish... But to me, that was never true friendship, not the idealised vision I always had in mind and which makes part of who I am. So I realised that really, I never had friends, only mere acquaintances at a given time and place, and that's why it was so easy to lose such people, one way or other.
But all this... is also a reflection of our times, surely. In a world immersed in materiality and greed, where it's okay to stump on the weak to get ahead and never look back, things like true love and friendship become the stuff of fairytales for the closed-minded and the cold-hearted ones.
How come so many people have closed shut their mind's window?... And the heart... The heart is frozen.
Love is today's undervalued emotion. Maybe we've heard that word being used in so many ways and forms that it has somehow lost its true meaning for most.
Growing up, I always assumed that I loved my mother because she was my mother. She was the one I'd always known, the one who gave me life, who looked after me and loved me unconditionally. So I took it for granted that surely I loved her.
I was wrong. I was merely responding to a biological attachment. How do I know that? Because I realised the truth of this the moment I stepped back and began to look at her not as my mother, but as a person in her own rights.
I began to wonder: "what if we weren't related and we'd just met in the street, or at school, or even at work? Would we get on then? Would we have anything in common?"
These questions struck me as quite interesting... What if... We'd never been related, and met in life, and we couldn't stand each other? What would that make of my attachment to her in terms of mother and child?
If as unrelated people we could never have liked each other, then surely the 'love' I feel for her as my mother rests solely on biological attachment - the very one that forces a natural bond between people. And maybe that is why for so many, when there is only that bond, it is so easy to break.
So I asked myself those questions a couple of years back and at first I must confess I really thought we had nothing in common. In fact, my first conclusion was that she was so strange and cold that I would have disliked her from the word go, had we met by chance in life. I would go so far as venturing that we would never even have spoken a word to each other because she was never the social type to go to people, and neither am I. She would have kept a defiant distance, and I... I would probably be too lost in my own head to even notice.
So I didn't really love my mother?... It was merely a biological bond?...
Nah... I began to observe her, not as a mother, but as a human being detached from my person. It wasn't an easy task, but I began to notice more of her qualities and human flaws... I began to appreciate her just for who she was. And one day I realised that actually, she was a person I would have wanted to know in my life. When that thought struck me, I think I gave her the biggest hug ever in my life, and she probably could never guess why.
That day was the day I began to truly love my mother, not because of some biological bond, but with the might of my inner heart.
The depth of my emotions is akin to a bottomless well... The only downside of this is that it means I am bound to feel the whole spectrum of emotions more than most people out there. In effect, that means I will always be prone to inner suffering, especially now that over the years I have developed a deep sense of empathy and compassion for all living creatures.
Just like my mind, I'm really starting to realise that the size of my inner heart is boundless... No limits. Together, they become a whole universe of their own. Forever expending and stretching past the unfathomable.
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