Friendships are extremely important in life, aren’t they? If we have bad friends, of course, this also has irrevocable consequences.
But if we’re fortunate, and most of us are, we initially we make good friends, not really profound friends, but decent friends as we’re going through high school, and many times those friends will change.
And if we’re fortunate, we make friends that will last for our lifetime. Our parents are truly instrumental in this, aren’t they? Because they guide us.
They encourage us to go with those people for an evening, nurture friendships there, dissuade us from going there, and they try to grant us a sense of direction. And then if we fail when we’re 20 years old or so, then it’s on us, isn’t it?
It’s really on us. Our parents usually have done their best, absolutely.
Now, if we don’t have a parent, in the United States, for instance, they say that only maybe 20% of young black families actually have a father, then this means that you don’t have that parental guidance. You don’t have a father’s guidance.
So, gosh, looks where it leads, you know. The disproportionate amount of young black men are in jail in the United States.
And many people say this directly related to the fact that they don’t have families, nuclear families, a mother, father functioning this way, the poor mother doing everything to try to support the family, having several jobs. And who raises you?
Well, your friends. And many of those friends in this case are obviously not good people. When I was going to high school, I had a very good friend, and we played in a band, and I was going to be a superstar, as he was, I’m sure as well.
And when we were in grade 11, he said that we’re quitting school, we’re going on the road, we’re going to be successful. So I went home, and I told my mom, I said, Mother, I’m quitting school. And she said absolutely nothing.
Then after about five minutes, a very, very long time, she began to vibrate, and out of her mouth came this rather screeching voice, You’re not quitting school. And she startled me, she scared me. So I didn’t quit school, but he did.
And he was away from his family, and he fell into a bad relationship, and today he’s dead. He didn’t become the superstar that he was supposed to have been. Bad friends.
Now, I’ve been blessed with two friends that I’d like to share. One is my friend in Poland, Stanislaw Kosch. We’ve been friends now for over 50 years.
We went to university together in Paris when I was 18 turning 19 years old, and he invited me back to Poland, and gosh, I built a relationship with Poland, with Polish since that time, and I still speak Polish, and I still talk to him on a very
regular basis. And now with Messenger, it’s extremely easy. And really with me, he shared the exotic. From him, I probably learned style more than anything, because he comes from a very good family.
He went on to marry a lovely girl, had four children, business man, knows a lot of high-profile, as they say, political people. Well, wonderful, just wonderful.
My life has been totally enriched because of meeting him and his sensitivity to nature and life in general. My other friend was introduced to me by my fiancee, a lady who eventually became my wife.
And he was English, and he was a traveling, at the time he was a traveling salesman, he was selling glasses, of all things.
And then, of course, eventually he became involved in the stock market, and he introduced me to money, I guess you could say he introduced me to how money worked, how to play the stock market.
And both of these men are still friends of mine, some 50 years later, and both are still alive, because, I mean, obviously, I’m not young either.
But I think to myself, gosh, if I hadn’t met these two people, and I’ve met other people as well, but if I hadn’t met these two people, my life would have been much, much poorer for sure.
And then I had a bit of a loss as well.
I met a friend in Taiwan, and we were friends for about 10 years, and he was from South Africa, and he played music, and he knew art, and he took me to South Africa, showed me all around, and it was really an eye-opener.
And then he had a heart attack, and they didn’t restart his heart in time, and he got cerebral hypoxia, which means the mind is essentially dead, and he died some three months later, and he was gone. He was gone.
And I had known him for ten years, and I felt such a sense of loss, because our friendship was really just beginning to blossom, more than anything, right? So there we are.
Friendship is important, because it broadens your world to a very large extent.
So I guess the point is, in the age of the Internet, in these artificial friendships that we seem to make, we must be cautious, because friendships will nurture us to become perhaps the man or the woman that we deserve to be, but bad friendships will
pull us down into the ground, and will destroy us, ultimately, right? Socrates always says that we can only do good, initially. And I was watching a program today on a group of young people who broke into a jewelry store in San Francisco.
Twenty of them broke into this jewelry store and smashed and stole and what have you, and I thought to myself, gosh, the alpha male there is certainly leading all those kids astray.
Those friendships, whether they’re tight or they’re loose, are ultimately extremely perilous because they’re not going to benefit those people long term, are they? They’re certainly not.
Because we know that violence and theft and all the rest of it is ultimately not going to assist us.
You know, and when you first go to university, that becomes a problem because you want to be cool and you want to be attractive and you want to be associated with clever people and people that are up and coming and just maybe those people are not
good. They look good on the outside, but maybe their methodologies are ultimately bad. They’re evil. And you have to know when to walk away, I guess, as painful as it is.
You’ve got to know when to say, Oh, gosh, this friendship is absolutely not good for me. I need the higher ground.
And even if it means in a way that you’re going to be alone, maybe this is an intimate relationship that you think that this person is a wonderful human being, and he or she turns out to be no good as a partner.
Well, you got to learn to walk away as painful as it is, because you got to protect you. There’s no one like me. There never has been, there never will be, but I can be corrupted on my path.
And ultimately, like my friend so many years ago, he married the wrong girl, basically. And that whole relationship pulled him into the ground. So we got to be smart.
Yes, we need friends, for sure. But the first person I must be a friend with is me.
For sure as well, I must learn to nurture me with my notebook, talk to me, and then I can have external friendships, because all friendships are external to me with the exception of God, right? I can have a personal friendship with God, for sure.
But other people, I can have deep friendships, soulmates, call it whatever you like, but those friendships can go away, and I must learn to retain my self-worth, my self-respect, always. So enjoy your friendships, nurture them.
They are necessary and they are wonderful, and you know what they say, you know what they say, critical thinking is everything, especially if we’re going to nurture and find friendships, and critical thinking is great, truly great. You take care.
God bless. Bye-bye.