Written in honour of Friendship Appreciation Month!
When I was younger, on an ordinary day you would be sure to find me playing outside with the people I called my friends. We played house and fought about who got to be the mummy and who got to be the daddy. We started little physical fires to cook our fake food (usually grass and bananas) in empty tins and got sick from eating it. We also played policemen and robbers and stuck-in-the -mud every so often. We started taking tennis lessons together and grew apart when high school started. We buried treasure and forgot about it and ten years down the road when we bumped into each other on the street, we’d remember our treasure and sigh at the apartment building built atop the place where we had buried it. We had tea and biscuits and gossiped the sleepovers away on the weekends and called each other best friend as we walked around the school campus at break-time. My friends knew everything about me. Those were the good ol’ days.
We’ve definitely come a long way since then, haven’t we?!
When mobile phones finally managed to grace this humble little overpopulated country of ours, my dad was of course as the head of the household, the first in the family to own one. I walked into his office after school one evening and he had this thing on his desk. This ginormous robotic-looking contraption; like it was a weapon and a building tool all at the same time. It was an Ericsson GA628 and I was fascinated. 9 years old and a little geeky, if I wasn’t in the compound bullying my friends during a game, I was inside learning to use MS-DOS (before Windows came to be) so I could play PacMan and the Prince of Persia on my dad’s laptop computer while giving his phone goo-goo eyes. I spent hours teaching myself code and when I finally cracked it, I spent even more time trying to rescue the princess from the tower which I only managed to do once before the girly bits of me started to develop.
And then technology started to develop too, from fixed telephony to mobile broadband.
Now, we have somehow managed find the time to live multiple lives – the real ones and the ones we can construct on the internet. Being close enough to talk to but not too close to let anyone see the reality of our situations. We have pretty much glorified the most important, as well as the most mundane and trivial aspects of our lives. Eating a sandwich simply isn’t eating a sandwich if it hasn’t been shared or posted on a social network first. We’re LoL-ing and LMFAO-ing on our phones and computers when what we’re really doing is smiling or nodding our heads. I know this first hand. We’ve embraced narcissism and dressed it up and called it advertising your work. We’ve taken our happy and sometimes most depressing truths, dolled them up into unrecognisable versions of the truth, as long as an element of it is reflected in a bid to get as many likes/shares as possible. The internet has become our play-ground and we’re all playing one hideous game of dress-up.
With the advent and consistent proliferation of mobile devices and software, our friendships have, alongside it, changed.
Okay, fine, it isn’t as dastardly or as earth shattering as I just made it sound, but you’ve got to admit, it’s pretty heavy stuff. I realised at some point that if I was hanging with my friends and we all happened to be typing away at our phones, there was a problem; if all we ever talked about when we met was what so-and-so said on Facebook (this has actually happened to me before, several times), then there’s a problem; if we posed for photos all the time so they could be posted on a website, there was a problem. I started to believe we’d sold the souls of our friendships to the internet and were given back less than what they were originally worth; and so I decided to try for something different.
As Friendship Appreciation Month comes to a close, I am thankful for all of the relationships that were spared and strengthened by a decision to not let the social media be their lifeline. There is a depth and a truth in the sacrifice made to write little notes, send the odd email or text and actually call someone up for coffee. There has been a weight lifted and a sense of release/relief in the space where I once laboured to honestly maintain 500+ friendships; in a place where the lines between friend and acquaintance were blurry and not so clearly defined. I have learned over time to actually appreciate and focus on the soul of a person and not on what they have, ate or where they spent their last holiday. I have found a treasure and a depth in the actual and real people this journey has led me to find and learned that simplicity works every time in obtaining clarity.
Thank you for being my friend and allowing me to be yours!
The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.
― Bob Marley
Only love!
Filed under: *live words*, Author, Friendship, Lessons, Real Talk Tagged: Belonging, blogging, Change, community, Facebook, family, friendship, gaming, Hope, Internet, Journey, Learning, Life, Love, Mind, Mobile Phone, Need, opinion, Peace, people, Quest, Quotes, Relationships, Seeking, Social Media, Soul, Strength, Technology, Writing 
