Friendship was a childhood mystery. Its origins were evasive and its presence was like a spell that waned and waxed with the moon. And with each turn, I learned that I could predict absolutely nothing about the nature of its formation.
From regarding friendship as a position (because when you're a child, the title of best friend is like the title of "President" — exclusive but probably renewable every four years) to seeing it as a product of social skills to finally accepting it as a supernatural phenomenon, I slowly discarded the levels, categories, and titles of friendship for complete and utter acceptance. That is, I stopped thinking about it, simply because there was no deciding factor for who I made friends with and how.
Friendship happened like magic.
Now initially, I thought friendships grew from common interests — and at first it made sense. To my young mind, a shared love of reading, Harry Potter, and Asian food seemed like a perfect recipe for friendship. But at some point I realized that friendship grows common interests rather than the other way around. And as obvious as this might seem, the fact didn't strike me until I met two incredibly different people, who later became incredibly good friends.
Coming in with distinctly different personalities and interests, we had only one thing in common. Our families spent a lot of time together, and thus by filial obligations, so did we.
Sounds like a recipe for disaster, right?
Well as it turns out, when you spend that much time together, you discover things with them (surprise surprise); all likes and dislikes are digested simultaneously and most importantly, commonalities are formed.
This idea goes back to the cliche phrase: "It just takes time." And from experience, I suppose that's true. Friendship does take time. But like all things, there are variations and exceptions, and often, friendships that require more time have a lower possibility of actually blossoming. It's like a big formula where the combination of different facets of yourself equates to the number of potential friendship links — potential being the key word. And trying to figure it out before it happens is just a #mess. Because the activation times, the maturation times, the thousands of different variables that come with being human, could turn the tables either way.
So in essence, trying to determine who you can be friends with and why, is stupid. Friendship itself is a fantastic collision of fates where personalities either explode without warning or pass by at the wrong time and place. And stressing about how to make friends, how to find the "right" people is only going to be just that — stress. All the levels and qualifications used to match up and define "kinds" of friends, are just manifestations of everyone's different sides. My expectations and labels were manifestations of my different sides. The dominant parts of myself were the dominant priorities in my relations and the hidden ones were connections yet to be discovered. I connected with people similar to me, but only later did I discover that people different than me were different only because I had parts of me that hadn't been developed.
Thus, I learned how to let go. And as a result, I've made fantastic friends over a few meetings with people I never thought I'd talk to and I've drifted from people I never thought would go away. Nothing was in my foresight so there was no point trying to limit or control my interactions. All the things I thought were requirements for friendships — hobbies, morals, backgrounds, etc. — were simply qualities that sped up the incubation time of friendship. And if the time shortened enough to fit into the pace of life, then a friendship was born.
A spell was cast, and life was made magical.
