Dear Friend, Life Must Go On

It’s always good to hang out and get together with friends. As we’re getting along with our friends, we must still keep focusing on what we want to achieve in our life. While each of our friends has different goals in their life, we must also focus on ours, otherwise we will be left behind in our life.

Our friends one day may leave us to reach their dream, or it could be the other way around. It is such a common phenomenon in life. Have you ever thought about your old friends in elementary school, high school, or university? Where are they now? ... Yes, it is great if we still meet up or keep in touch with them. But some might have been disappeared from our radar. And again, that is just perfectly normal. They have to continue their life journey, and so do we.

Often I found very good friends in different places. But after some period of interaction, it is time to say good bye again. I’m not regretting that. To have such a high-quality friendship is a precious gift in this world. It’s a matter of whether we can deal with the sudden change of a situation where we have less and less time to interact with our friends. After all, true friends will always be close to our heart although they are separated thousand miles away from us.

The wise saying tells us that we should not have too much attachment to our friends in many respects. Indeed, experiences teach me that too much attachment to our close friends eventually causes more emotional pain when thing doesn’t work as what we expect. Unless, you are spiritually awakened enough to control your emotion, or in other words to say, you are free from attachment, that would be great! However, most people suffer “gloomy” period due to this emotional pain. It may take one week, a month, or even longer to dissolve such feeling.

“You may not know that you’re attached to something until you lose it or there is the threat of loss” (Tolle, 2005: A New Earth)

My colleague, Y. Apriliansyah, gave me a very good advice on how not to be overly attached to our fellow friends. Follows are the paraphrase on what he said: Attachment is caused by strong emotional bound, i.e. love, implicitly. Therefore, we must prioritize the distribution of our love. The first two highest priorities are to our Creator and to our parents (My comment: Most Indonesian believes that God is supposed to be the 1st priority to love then followed by our parents, but in India is the other way around. Despite different reasons in each country, both still agree that God and parents are the first two highest priorities to love. This is typical in most Eastern countries). Then we can dedicate our love to our spouse or sibling. Apparently, friends are relatively the last priority to love. The closest our bound with someone will be the more painful we suffer when we break up. In that case, only by shifting our love to the higher priorities we can dissolve such emotional pain.

My very personal suggestion is to be grateful always for those who still have good friends around. Be communicative and open to your good friends to avoid any misunderstanding. And ideally, we should not have overly attachment and too much dependency towards our friends, then we can enjoy our friendship without any prejudice, jealousy, and other kind of negative attitude.

So in this chance, I’d like to say to all my dearest friends: I’m sorry for my negative thoughts that have caused any problem and misunderstanding between you and I; Please forgive me; I love you; Thank you for being my friends and becoming part of my life (Ho'oponopono Teaching).

Many thanks to Mr. Thayalan and Yudi Apriliansyah