Thought Picnic: I remain a friend

Understanding self-absorption

There are times in life where one can become quite self-absorbed and oblivious of the world around. Forgetting all the various things that make for life and living from within oneself and from around in places where we might have literally no influence.

Self-absorption can so easily create blindness, blindness to reality, blindness to facility, blindness to opportunity and a decline into seething resentment and a sense of apathy.

Yet, self-absorption should not be discounted, it is being caught in the maelstrom of experience, the howling winds, the battering of the storm, the foreboding and present scent of danger in reaction to infirmity, incapability, adversity, grief, or other kinds of human experience.

Thank you for being a friend

What matters most is to find some respite, some insight, maybe some therapy in talk or the turn that gives a person the opportunity to reassess a situation and hopefully find a new purpose. It takes longer to get to a smile, but a seed of hope is being sown.

Nothing helps you out of self-absorption better than a friend, a friend who can feel your pain, a friend that can hear that soundless cry of questions you have never given voice to, neither would they put you in an uncomfortable place, they ease you through to a better place.

That help I found when many things came together in a perfect storm presaging an almost compulsion to act. Over a number of conversations, we walked through stages of anger, resentment, depression, bargaining and acceptance, like the Kubler-Ross model for addressing grief had come to the matter of self-absorption brought on by extenuating circumstances.

Don’t underestimate past relationships

What I learnt the most at the end of the last conversation was the tendency to feel powerless because of inactivity and by that underestimate ourselves where a reputation that had been formed in a setting spoke enough about a person without the need to force issues.

If you have taken the time to foster relationships and friendships, believe in the ability of those to work without agency. Impressions are made on people you know, and despite what their self-interest might dictate, with the passage of time, good impressions last and with that eventually you will win through.

I remain a friend

In another setting, having to accommodate the irritable and uncouth drew on the deepest reserves of patience and tolerance. You refrain from the bitter riposte and eliminate the tendency to use an engagement to foment the irrational like you might excuse the occasional rant of a drunk who says the most untoward things just because you see a bigger person unfortunately overtaken by drink.

The drink, in this case, was some physical pain, some stress and exasperation, and though I am sad that such behaviour was exhibited, I know in my heart of hearts that I like the person a lot more than that. Maybe in due course, something positive will come of it, friendships established on a firm ground would weather the storms of self-absorption.

It is the deed that matters rather than the words, in whatever we do with the relationships we cultivate, may we always find every way to foster then best in ourselves and in others that speaks to the heart, saying, “I remain a friend,” if you still want to be a friend.