Friendship

                                       Friendship

There is only one happiness in life, to love and to be loved, because lovingness is our natural state. In love , you make yourself necessary to some one. Love is also much more- a desire and devotion that drives one to do only good and a tenderness that arouses delight and elicit deep affection in the heart.
Friendship is , in fact, an expression of love, a powerful emotional bond. The beauty, endurance and strength of love can be celebrated by honoring friendship. Friendship is a real treasure in which man can cherish love and get cherished by love.

As man by nature is gregarious, friendship is inevitable. Fate makes our relatives and choice makes our friends. Choosing the right friend is vitally important to our outlook on life. The laziest man is he who does not seek to acquire friends, still lazier is the one who loses friends because he makes no effort to keep them.

Parents must teach children to make friends and cherish them and to distinguish rewarding friendships from harmful ones. The effect of friendship has been beautifully illustrated thus -

"  A rain- drop if thrown upon a red hot iron is even deprived of its own existence, where as if it happens to fall upon the leaf of a lotus plant it soon assumes the appearance of a beautiful pearl and the same is again turned into a real pearl if it chances to drop into the mouth of a seashell (oyster) in the auspicious time of swati star. It is therefore to be inferred that the bad, mediocre and the good attributes of a thing are always to be traced to the company it keeps."

It is also said,

" Would you judge a man? Find out who his friends are."

Also,

" If I touch my hand to a board, there is only a blunt sound but if I touch it to the key of the instrument there is a musical sound. And the effect produced upon a person by that which he comes in contact depends upon what there is to be touched."

So children's friendship with good from pre-school through adulthood will stimulate their moral development and lend to their lives a richness, depth, beauty, vitality and variety that cannot be duplicated by any other means.

What is a true friendship?

The profound effect of love upon each other is beautifully delineated between water and milk..

" When water was mixed with milk, the latter gave all its qualities to it. Consequently when water saw the distress of milk it began to burn itself. The sight of its friend's calamity much agitated milk and it went out of the pot to destroy itself on the burning embers. At this stage water came to its help and the milk soon became calm and cool. The friendship of the good is just like it."

This is true friendship. The analogy here is the boiling of milk. When water is mixed with milk before boiling, the water becomes one with the milk and when the milk boils, water added to it also boils. Seeing the water boiling, the friend milk becomes agitated and tries to come out the pot and fall on the fire as if to destroy itself. At this stage, when few drops of water are poured over the milk it cools down and does not come out of the pot.

Distance also never severs true friendship.

As we grow older, we learn to treasure our  best friends, to value their loving concern and counsel.
Friendship can be found almost anywhere even within our families.
Of all the things, a good marriage is a bonded friendship.Wedding marks a treasured moment of commitment and love. It is the foundation of societal well- being and preservation of values. The most wonderful of all things in life is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a growing depth, beauty and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between human beings is the most marvellous thing. It cannot be found by looking at it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of divine accident and the most wonderful of all things in life.
Why do we seek our partners ?
Plato believed that we are all in search of our other half. In the beginning, he wrote, every one had 2 heads, 4 arms and both sexes. But the king of gods, fearing the power of humans cut them in two  into male and female. Since that time, we have searched for our other half until we found the one who completed us.
In India, girls worship goddess Parvati for a good husband for Shiva and Parvati are considered as ideal couple. So love is not a weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it. So the union of husband and wife is sacred . This bond is not limited to this birth only. It is believed that the devoted wife follows her equally devoted husband in all births to come.Such is this unique friendship !