Friendship
by Anna Warwick
This was last week’s Editor’s Blog column: A beautiful friend of mine forwarded an email to me last week which explained that people come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime.
The email explained that when someone is in your life for a reason, it is to aid you physically, emotionally or spiritually. They come and help you then they disappear off the radar and it is “time to move on”. Those who come into your life for a season, teach you something or help you to grow… they make you happy then away they go. But apparently lifetime relationships teach you the tough lifetime lessons. So your job is to accept the lesson and the person, and use all the lessons from that friendship (eg patience, tolerance, acceptance, turning a blind eye, selective hearing, forgiveness, not being a hypocrite etc, etc) to deal with all your other relationships. Then the email said that love is blind but friendship is clairvoyant…
Anna's grandma - Kath.All I know is that my 95 year old grandma still has mates from her childhood, and that when she loses a friend it gets her down more than anything else in the world. In fact it seems to be the only thing that gets her down: “That’s the hardest part of getting older… losing your friends,” she says.
I reckon true friendships are magic – when your love or family relationships get hard – your friends are the ones who unconditionally love and support you. They are the ones who call you on your crap and help you laugh at yourself, help you keep it real, reassure you and don't let you get too down. Friendships are such fundamental relationships and they do take some work but they pay off times a billion. And true friends come in all sorts of unexpected shapes and sizes.
Here are some of the friendship stories our readers sent in to respond:
Hi Anna,
I am a regular on your website (biggest fan I would say) and I just read you little article on friendship. It is so true what you wrote and I immensely enjoyed your article. So much so that I copied it, printed it out and have put it on my fridge at home. I plan to send it to my best friend in Melbourne and let her know that her friendship is one of the ones that are to fulfil me for the rest of my time on this earth!
A wonderful read. Well Done!
Natalie Pierpoint
Dubbo NSW
Dear Anna,
I have a best friend that I call a soulmate. We have been friends for 20 years next year and we have been through all sorts of things together - even though we have very different lives – I am married with children, and I work part time. My best friend is unmarried, with no children and a dynamic career.
I tell my two children that best friends take a lifetime to develop and you have to have experienced many different things together, not just the good.
She is first person I talk to about everything, no matter what - and even though we now live in different states I still talk to her nearly every day. It is a friendship that I cherish with all my heart and I love her dearly, warts and all and she feels the same. I consider myself blessed to have her in my life. This one is for a lifetime and when all else seems to be crumbling around me there she is.
Warm regards,
Samantha
Friends and friendship!
I am a person truly blessed with friends and friendship, and could not limit this to one or one experience, happening or event.
There is Kerry, who has been a great and good friend from the 1970s: we engaged in the great feminist struggles for rape law reform, equal rights to marital assets, and for practices to change so that criminal assault at home and other forms of domestic violence would be taken seriously and dealt with like the crimes they are. We worked together with another great friend, Di, twice our chronological age but never older in direction, feistiness and comprehension of the real issues facing women - and to be fought for! Then there's Jennifer, whom I met in the 1970s too, and with whom I worked on getting up seminars on women and politics, women and the bureaucracy, women and affirmative action.
This, all in the context of an organisation with a male-dominated board - yet, we did it! And ran the seminars in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.
Next, Karen - whom I met in the 1990s and with whom I have made and am making films – is a great woman with great projects, great ideas, great resolution of them - and great persistence in a field where persistence is a *must*. Then there's Maureen, with whom I have talked and talked and talked, trying out all manner of legal arguments and ways of looking at landmark cases as we fought them through the 1990s - and continuing on to the present...
I could add more but you wanted only one! Yet these women have stayed with me through the ups and downs of politicking and struggle - and are still with me, and I with them. Like your grandmother, this is what will truly count for me as we age ... although as your grandmother will know, too, when the physical presences go, something - a vitality - always remains. The solidity of friendship, of battles fought and won, of sticking alongside and supporting against the forces that are lined up against the women who fight for the rights of all women - and oh, so resoundingly, blissfully win - enough times for us all to keep going! Why stop? Impossible when surrounded with the wonderful woman of solid, funny, resounding friendship and spirit!
Every good wish, Dr Jocelyn a. Scutt
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