Changing Emotions

“Men may come and men may go but I go on forever” is a saying that I have heard many times. I never realized the in depth meaning this saying had until yesterday when I really pondered about the people I have met so far and what they really meant to me. I am basically a friend oriented person and I attach significant importance to all my friends. If I look back and think of all the friends I had ever come across right from my early childhood days, I should say that I had expressed different kinds of feelings for each one of them since they were unique and special in their own way. But at the same time, if you ask me “who is your best friend?” the answer would be the friend whom I made last.

Undoubtedly, at every point I had to part from every friend of mine, I had displayed a variety of emotions since I could not withstand the excruciating episode of parting. Initially, I made it a point to write to them, call them once in a way and somehow stay in touch with them. But at some stage the line of separation was profusely felt since I could not reach on to them the moment I really wanted to share something. I, as a result relied on the friend within the reachable limit to share my feelings. I believe that this is the case with many of us though we fail to fully accept the fact. Friends keep changing as we move further in our life. For that matter every unnamed relationship we come across changes with the passage of time. It doesn’t remain constant. The fond memories can still be cherished and enjoyed but I bet those moments can never be re-lived. When we tend to re-live, it might turn to be less interesting contrary to what it was at the moment it was being experienced.

If you analyze the stages of a man starting from his childhood, his taste has only been varying year by year. Every Mother is a child’s first mate. It takes a long time for a child to shift his companion from Mother to a friend. The pre-school friends are easily forgotten by the kids. That is the period when the child first stays away from his home. That transition period is not easily accommodated by every child. Probably that’s the reason why the pre-school teachers who virtually mother the children become the child’s next comrade. So making friends at that point would be the child’s last option unless and until the child is extremely versatile.

I wanted to make my children’s first days at school memorable and hence I have retained the photos taken in their pre-school and have written down the names of the other kids in the photo along with the teacher’s name. I often remove the photo and ask my daughters to identify the other children in the photograph. Earlier, they used to show keen interest whenever I showed the snap to them. But these days, they seem to show less interest in it. What I could clearly make out from this is that, priority changes for everybody including a child. Every person has changing interests. As an infant, we would love to cling on to our Mother. As a toddler, we love to walk and run around to explore the world. As a child, we would love to play with toys and friends. As a young child, we would love to play with video games , TV or drawing / painting and so on. As a teenager, we would love to hang around with friends and parties and dances. As a grown up adult, we would love to read or write or talk / gossip with friends of similar wave length. This is the period when a person truly realizes the value of friendship or a relationship. This is the moment when we get stabilized and look forward to doing something serious in our life. We build up our career, we develop friendship, we decide about our future.

It should be remembered that at no point of time until here, the loss of a friend would have seriously affected us. Relationships don’t really matter until this stage. But from then onwards, we more or less understand the world and think about serious relationships like marriage. We at this particular period are considered to be highly emotional and attach predominant importance to friendship and affairs.

Take the case of a love affair – we totally rely on the relationship and decide that life is baseless if we do not transform this relationship into a marriage. We believe that there is no other person in this world whom we will be able to love more than the person whom we loved at that moment. Sometimes the affair gets materialized in the form of a marriage and sometimes gets broken and results in a marriage with some other person. What I wish to say is that we believe that life is meaningless without a person but sooner or a little later we realize that life doesn’t stop on the loss of someone. Fully understanding this truth, we sometimes feel that some relationships are stirring enough that it takes much longer time to heal. Is it not?

Any relationship be it friendship or love ceases when it is destined to. Life keeps moving forward. Nobody is indispensable. Life continues until it has to stop.