Friendships

"A friend is someone who knows your past, yet stays with you in the present and walks with you into the future." Duke

I just had dinner with my secondary school classmates. The small number of us - five or six - still keep in touch regularly and spend most weekends hanging out. I think we are each other's link to the very memorable past and signposts of the change that has swept through our lives since those crazy days of teenaged existence. Certainly, each time we talk about our infamous and insane exploits of an unrestrained and unthinking teenhood, we seem to go into a time warp and the echoes of the times gone by seem as real and audible as the noise around us, wherever we may be.

There are a number of things that we did together that I am not proud of and many of which I now try to stop the students from doing, in a bid to pre-empt the mistakes that I had made from being repeated before my very eyes, but those memories serve now to remind me of what it means to be a teenager. Basically, being a teenager means doing things that may seem incomprehensible to adults just because s/he feels like it. Is acting on impulse and without careful consideration right? Of course not. However, this is a phase of life that we must all go through. Thankfully, the majority of us learn to rein in most of our selfish whims and fancies and grow to act responsibly, both for ourselves and the others around us. I guess that's what everyone means by maturation, growth and adulthood.

Going back to my secondary school friends, one of them - let's just call him PHL -will be leaving for an overseas posting in Hong Kong come the end of the month. I have no idea how long he will be based there, but it sure feels like something will soon be missing in my life. Such is the depth of our friendship that we can not meet for months and yet, once we meet, we can talk as if we had just met up the day before. That, I think, is the measure of deep friendship - the ability to re-connect with ease despite long periods of disconnection.

Such was the case when he was studying overseas in the States for four years during my university days. We were thousands of kilometres apart most of the year, but we never grew apart at all. I suppose, with some certainty, that that's what it is going to be like again. Yet this impending parting has reminded me to be thankful for the friends around me and never to take them for granted. Such is the influence of globalisation that it has become commonplace for people to leave their home shores for work, often at short notice. As such, friends will have to start visiting one another in different parts of the world, as I will do in the near future.

The one thing I am truly grateful to my alma mater for is lifelong friendship. The few of us have grown up together, matured together and gone through some unbelievably insane times together. God willing, there will more such memories to come yet. (Of course, we will be more careful and responsible this time round.)