What is friendship?
Friendship has always been there, even before human race had coined the term. It originates from the basic human need that one needs to love and be loved. One needs to belong to another person, probably in a relationship less binding than family and marriage. Less binding it will be, but it also means more freedom for one to develop it. You cannot choose your family. You can always choose your friends. If all your friends are snobbish, selfish, inconsiderate, drug-abusing, hard-drinking sociopaths, I would wonder what you are like. Some friendship lasts a life-time. Others may just last minutes. Some friendship is cultivated by long-suffering, never-failing loyalty and steadfastness. Others are built on a simple kind gesture, a sincere smile, a hearty hello or a simple " do you need help?"
It doesn't make the latter less valuable. Friendship can also meltdown like ice-cream out of the fridge, on a hot summer day. You mean to enjoy it but turn around to do or meet something else more urgent, more important or more hard-to-get than friendship. When you are done, you think friendship will be waiting for you there, in the same place and the same form. You are only half right. It is still in the same place, but yet it is not the same any more. It may still return to you in a worthy form and mean something important to you. But you won't know when and how. What's worse, it might never return.
You will be sitting there, staring at your melted ice-cream, wondering whether you should keep it, dump it, or go for something else. You only have yourself to blame. Friendship is also like childhood memories. It gets better as time goes by, especially after you've talked about it over and over again, and after you have forgotten the not so beautiful details. To have great friendship, you have to give good friendship. You have to remember the right things and good things about your friends and forget the wrong and ugly. That's exactly how your friends can put up with you. Before you can be a great friend to others, you will have to be a true friend to yourself. You have to know your own strengths and weaknesses and yet still accept and love yourself, without idolizing yourself. It is the same way you treat your good friends.
