A few days ago I asked participants of one of my seminars:

“Please make a list of people who, when they asked you for help, you would be ready to drop everything you are doing right then, no matter where you are right then, no matter what duties await you, and run to help these people. But you have to exclude your children and your parents from the list.”

Everybody made their list. Then I asked them:

“Now, reduce the list by 1/2. I know it will be a challenge to eliminate some people from the list, but I believe you are capable of doing so.”

And then I asked them another question. What was the question? You will find it out at the end of my writing.

I have been observing that we as a humans have approached a state of devaluating or misunderstanding the meaning of the word friend.

I don’t want to blame e.g. FB and its “friends” feature, which seems to push people to add as many “friends” as possible. The reason for doing so is different for every person. Some do so to increase their own “popularity”, to spy upon others, to put their nose into the issues of others, to collect a marketing places, etc. etc.

It is in human nature that we want to know what other people are doing, what do they have or how they manage their lives. But there is another side to “friendship”. A lot of people have a tendency to pay court to others. They are ready to “pay” a lot to be, let’s say, rewarded.

This sort of pseudo althruism makes people pay their way into somebody’s live. They do things, favours even when they haven’t been asked for. We think that by doing so The Life will pay us back. We are “Samaritans” who pray to be rewarded… But there is a painful truth: Mother Teresa was the only one and we have to stop pretending we have her attitude as a natural gift.

The thing is that the lower ones self-esteem, the bigger the need to run and do favours for others. The lower ones self-appreciation, the faster we seek the praise of others, their commendation, or we just want to be noticed by others and to hear: “you are a good man!”.

Coming back to the word “friend”. A word of huge meaning, but we have allowed its devaluation. We have permitted it to be reduced , to be cut down to the level of an empty treasure. Who is a real friend of mine to me?

What a mean question! It’s mean, because it makes me redefine the meaning of myself. Who am I as me myself and who I am to somebody else? Because it is not the point who somebody is for us.

The point is who we really are, what are our values, what our principles are, what kind of morality do we represent. What part of ourselves we praise and what part we condemn and what part we are ashamed of? What have we done in our life till this day? What haven’t we done because of our laziness, our conceit, because of being too scared or too greedy? Because we have become hypocritical and conformists due to so called social (or family) expectations?

As I have written earlier, now is the time for the last part of “the list”.

The last thing I told them to do was to make a call to every person who was left on the list and ask him/her a question:

“Would you be ready to drop everything you might be doing right now, no matter where you might be right now, no matter what duties are awaiting you, and come to me if I called you and asked you for help?”