The Raja-Yoga chat of Saturday has stayed longer with me, coming back time and again about happiness, inner peace and the influences we let to get to us. In this chat one of the attendants made a question basically going on the line of 'what should one do when someone close to us is in a well of unhappiness, sinking lower and you can't do anything about it?'. The answer from the yogini was 'why is it your business?'. Thinking of my own situation, the answer came switfly to my mind 'because I care and I love them', but the answer of the yogini was much more simple, and could be summarized the following way 'you can't realize the inner self of them, nor can you pull them out if they don't pull themselves out'. This was a realization that hit me flat on the face, since though I'm quite individualistic and mind my own business, there are situations where I follow a care-code where I take to my heart the matters of other people.
Thinking about this matter, I was wondering about my role as friend. It's clear that the commonplaces and two-cent psichology lines of forwarded e-mails and text messages don't apply. That gooey, dripping sweet concept of "friends forever" and "BFF", "friends always support each other no matter what" and so on don't really apply. Or should it? Shall friends always be together and always support each other no matter what, and be in touch constantly, and depend on each other? If so, I guess I'd be better off without friends.
What make friends friends I don't really know, it seems to just spark up, happen, but how it is kept, that's the real deal! However, does this mean that you must nearly get into the other person's life or let yourself be sucked into the other person's life and become more than a confident, an agent of life? Does this mean you must not contradict your friends or you shall take to your heart if your friend thinks differently from you? If one applies the teachings of the Raja Yoga, within a friendship you must seek to be happy yourself, perhaps point out to your friend your perceptions of what can't help them to be happy, but you don't need to involve yourself and shoulder up the worries of your friend as if those were yours as well. This comes in clear contradiction with the friendship code some enforce where you are expected to care even when you don't, or you rather not put yourself in an uncomfortable position.
Friendship, like any relationship, requires first and foremost of a healthy dose of honesty, or shall we rather say sincerity. There's no real need to tell constantly the truth, as people are naturally unable to do so, as it happens that some truths are hard to tell or very intimate, need time or whatever, but aside from these, there is a need of truth in order to build it on a solid, real base. But aside from this sincerity, from which naturally comes to give what you feel like giving and accepting honestly what your friends feel like giving, what else could be needed?
So, if you are responsible of your own happiness, and you must allow your friends to find themselves and be responsible of their own happiness, what makes a good friend of a bad friend? Or there's not such a thing as "good friend" or "bad friend", just either friend or no friend?
The chat made me realize that really, though I can care for my friends, and maybe I can't avoid worriyng for those I love, it's not my place to interfere in their lives, not let them place me in a situation where I interfere in their lives. It is not my role as friend to be a yes-woman to them, nor to nag them to take this or that decision. It's a very delicate balance between how much you tell them, how much you help them and how much you must hold back yourself and give them the space they need to find themselves, exercise themselves and evolve towards their inner self and their natural hability to be perfectly happy.
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