Dear Fighter,
Today I was reading stories of the people on board the missing flight MH370. It was a reminder to me how fragile human life is. I hope and pray that I live the longest life and get to see you grow up and teach you all the things I want to teach you but the truth is, it’s not up to me. It’s up to God.
So while I am well and able I want to start writing a series of letters to you, published on my blog about the lessons I have learned in my life.
Sharing my experiences so that one day when you experience the same thing, you’ll know how to handle it perhaps better than me. And heck if and when I’m able to watch you grow up all the way then these letters can still be a guide to you one day. It’s me sharing my experience at the age that I’m at right now. 29… or well 30 this year.
Of course this is not the first time I wrote a letter to you. The first letter I wrote to you was written slightly over a week before you were born.
Today I am going to talk to you about friends.
You will discover the concept of having friends in the early days of your life. The early friendships are always the purest and the most innocent of all. There is nothing that any of you would want from one another apart from companionship. This holds true later in life too. As you grow older, you will make friends that help amplify the joy of things you can do in life. Like while you can kick around a ball on your own, it’s more fun with friends. While you can study on your own, it’s more fun with friends and while you can watch TV on your own… it’s again more fun with friends.
There will also be friends that do more for you than just being a companion. Friends who will stand up for you when you are being taken advantage of and friends that will be there for you when you are down.
There are different types of friends in this world.
My father (your grandfather) taught me this at a very young age. When I was just a boy, I was talking to my father about my best friend in school. I asked him then who his best friend was. The answer he gave me surprised me because I thought it was another friend of his whom I would always see him go out with. He explained to me “That friend is a friend for fun. If one day I had no money and was nobody, I would never see him again.”
When I asked him how he knew… my Dad said he just did. I grew up learning that it was a gut feeling and in life sometimes that gut feel can be wrong… but most of the time it’s right. Even with this gut feel though we sometimes make mistakes because we blind ourselves into wanting to believe that someone who we spend our laughs with is someone who would be there for us no matter what. That however is not always true.
There are friends who always put themselves first before you, there are friends who are with you because they need something from you or there are friends who are with you because they need you. There are all sorts of different friends. Just because someone is nice to you doesn’t mean he or she is a good friend.
Just like there are good friends. There will also be friends who may start off as good friends but will disappoint you.
We all get disappointed with friends we make many times in life. Disappointment though always comes from expectation. That you expect a friend to be loyal to you or to be there for you but that doesn’t happen. You are therefore then disappointed. I for one have been disappointed by friends many many times. I’ve had friends who had cheated me and stole from me, friends who had betrayed me and friends who had said untrue things about me behind my back. The one thing I learned though is to expect that the world is a lonely place. That we have many acquaintances… but very few friends.
It’s true, I have many acquaintances… but very few friends.
It is hard to have friends. Friendship is something you have to invest in. You have to invest time in the right friendships and time is something we don’t have a lot of. So it’s hard to have many friends… but the good news is that we don’t need many. We just need a few good ones.
I found that our expectations of friendships change as we grow older.
From my school years all the way till my mid twenties, it was all about having as many friends around you as possible. The more friends you had, the more popular you were… although as in my previous point… it’s impossible to have many friends because we just don’t have the time to invest in that many friends. So we actually end up having many acquaintances that we mistake for friends and when they disappoint us… we get hurt.
As I got older though time became more and more limited. I spent more time at work and more time with your mom. When you were born a lot of my time went to you too. So I had even less time to spend with my friends and I prioritize my time with the few I have. It’s almost as if nature forces us to narrow down our true friends and stick to them.
So don’t feel sad if you have friends that disappoint you or exclude you in anything.
The truth is as you get older you probably won’t that many friends anyway. Who you will have are a few friends but friends who will be with you through thick and thin. Friends you may no longer have to spend a lot of time with but have enough history with to know that you can count on them.
The exciting part ahead Fighter is knowing who your friends for life are going to be. I don’t hope that you will always have many friends. I only hope that you will have a few very very good ones that will be there for you whenever you need them. When you find those friends, never let them go.
Love,
Daddy
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space