Of the relationships I have experienced throughout my life, some I thought could be labelled as 'friendships'. More than once I have had discussions - fierce ones - with people of my surrounding about what makes a good friend. 'You need to label them into categories' they kept saying , to which I would argue that this was futile and unnecessary. According to me, as long as you know where you stand with people, you naturally relate to each and every person with a different focus and attention. Well...that was what I thought until I came across the Mangala and Kalyani Mitr sutras which suddenly set things into a contrasting perspective to me.
I think I am starting to get what people mean by 'categorizing' friends, except that it is no simple task. People are flawed. We all are, and as logical as it is to state that one should associate oneself with wise and supportive people, it is a fact that those we love have shady behaviors sometimes.
Are you willing to bring up awkward topics if you think that will help when you see them go astray? I pondered about that last night and decided to address a delicate issue while talking to my friend Shafeeq. Of all those in my close circle, Shaf, whom I have known for more than 02 decades has turned out to be a real maze lately. He has become the epitome of contradiction and tends to run from one extreme to another not paying enough attention to the consequences of his actions. Should this be pegged as ignorance? selfishness? denial? a lack of consciousness from his part? or a a bit of all four? Caring and supportive when it comes to me, he will show a total lack of interest and can easily be bored with people whom at one point he would have been enthusiastically involved with. This recurrent pattern is intriguing, worrying and weird at the same time.
We should see conditioned things as they are. The same applies for those we love and for the friends we have. People may have been close at heart during our younger years but changed drastically along the way. What can we do if not to let go of any sentimentality about it?
Whatever kind of life we have, friends who are part of it are just a reflection of it and yes, we DO need to know whom to associate with. I have often asked myself how good of a friend I, myself, am or have been and I guess it's a mix of everything; honest and fake, true and false, sincere and flatterer, generous and taker, supportive and reckless. It is never too late though. There is still room for improvement in this very life (I hope) and it won't hurt aiming at being a better human being.
On another note, my dad would have turned 84 today. He would have accomplished 1008 lunar cycles and fallen into the category of those not to be reborn.
I wonder whose body his consciousness has flown into and whether our paths have crossed already. I will always remember my father as someone calm, quiet, passionate when it came to his writings and dispassionate when it came to me...lol! Very proud of my sisters and brother, yet never quite knowing what to think about me or how to tackle the queer little thing that I was. Strange enough, I have never been able to be angry at him or even blame him for that simply because he was a good hearted person whom I try to emulate even today. Also, I have to be honest and admit that even I, myself, never knew what to think about me in the 80s/90s. Teenage years are somewhat ‘incongruous’ for bizarre persons like me and I still can't believe how lucky I was to have been safe from bullying, being estranged or marginalized. There was always someone kind around, be it a friend, an acquaintance, a relative or even a stranger who was caring and loving enough to check on me and ensure that I was okay. This, probably, also have to do with the fact that growing up I was rather unconcerned about my own sexuality. My life revolved around various centres of interests (music, sports, theatre, books, environmental issues, family...) but I never really took time to pause and reflect about those tendencies of mine and how they would influence my life. I was simply busy being happy as an individual and this, I think, this has been the greatest blessing of my life, my white karma.
My father cared and attended to his family in every possible way he could. He looked after our upbringing and ensured that we never lacked anything. He loved my mother dearly and passionately, was a faithful husband and provided us with the best academic education possible. He was what one would call a good husband and father and sometimes it saddens me a bit that I did not quite live up to his expectations. When I was 18-19 he wrote me a letter to tell me that I should reflect seriously about my future. Although I lived under his roof, he would be too shy to have an open conversation with me about it. It might sound weird but I find this cool and loving because I know that the shy person that he was could hardly express his feelings, par pudeur. It was his way of telling me that he couldn't figure how I would be embracing my future but that he cared. In return, I have tried to be the best son I could. I catered and attended to him dutifully in his last years and made sure that he enjoyed the comfort of his loving home when he was going through severe depression during the final stage of his life. Despite all this, deep inside, I have this unspoken feeling that I failed him somehow...for not being intelligent, straight, brave, ambitious enough, for not getting married and having a family of my own. When everyone was 'succeeding' professionally and giving him grand children, I was simply stuck being an average guy with a honest yet futile job. That said, I am not complaining and will definitely not go about revisiting my existence. From an objective point of view, it was, after all, not an unfair assessment for an anxious father. Still, I would have liked to muster enough courage to reassure him and shouldn't have worried about me because, all in all, I was managing to have a decent and very fulfilling life and that was more than what a father could have wished for his child.
