FRIENDSHIP

      Would you like to have friends? There is no one who does not want them. And when someone loses a friend, he or she can suffer a lot. Even I would like to have them, but I cannot. A lot of people like me, but they just like me. A friendship can only exist between persons. And you already know that I am not one.

    However, before we go any further, do you want to know what friendship is?

    Friendship is the mutual sympathy that people feel for each other, a sympathy that invites us to care for one another on a daily basis, to worry about the other and about the other’s problems, and to try to help them out.

    Some key words of friendship are:
    - Sympathy.
    - To care.
    - To worry.
    - To improve.

    Sympathy should be shown towards a person for both their qualities and defects. For this reason, a friendship may not be a true one if you feel sympathy towards the activities that the other person practices, for example, the sport they play. You can like someone because he or she has a motorcycle and you both go for a drive. This is just an example.

    The genuineness of a friendship is when friends look for each other to talk about their things: about their hobbies, their hopes, their worries, their difficulties. They feel attached to one another, and seek to be together in times of sadness and joy.

    There is no true friendship, as long as you do not reveal your own intimacy to the other.

    From this mutual surrender of privacy, the commitment of keeping a secret is a given and the initiative of helping each other becomes more natural. From this derives the want to improve and help out a friend. One is not a friend if he or she leads the other to bad behavior. At most, that person is an ally. Seek to avoid these allies, as soon as possible.

    Abandoning your moral standards or your own criteria just to accept those of your friend is not a sign of true friendship. This, rather, would be a sign of immaturity.

    A group of youngsters who dare each other to pranks that they would not do alone, are not true friends; they are a dangerous “gang”. Drug addicts start with being in “gangs”.

    Do you want to know where you can find friends?

    You can interact with children your age in different places. You have classmates in school, at your summer vacation location, in sporting activities; they are the children of your parents’ friends, etc. So of course, friends can be made from all these different environments.

    You will like some of them and it will be easy to talk to them. Little by little, from being acquaintances you will become friends, even if you do not explicitly say it. Friendship is not a commitment that is declared. It is something that is lived.   Warnings:

    · A friend must not dominate the friendship of the other. In other words, you should not prevent that a friend of yours has other friends.

    · True friends tend to be few. From among the people with whom we interact with, it is not frequent to find many that feel that mutual sympathy that leads to a true friendship.

    · Friends invite each other to their homes and meet each other’s families. It is good that your parents know who your friends are.

    · Everyone must know that, before friends, comes one’s own family with whom we must live with; and there are also some acquaintances that should not be discriminated against for being friends with any of them.

    The virtues that sustain and promote friendship are:
    - Loyalty.
    - Generosity.
    - Understanding.
    - Confidence.
    - Respect.
    - Modesty to express personal intimacies.    

I will talk about all of these later. It is worthy that you know these, and that you also live them. Your friends deserve it.

     Don Samuel Valero

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