Thinking back, I’m not sure I ever learned to make friends. I don’t know if I’ve ever really made one. A friend was there, and we became. Sports, school, or growing up close, one recognized something in another. We did not make a friend. We became one.
It seemed easier as a child, or the way life was structured then. We spent our days around the same people. Each new school year brought new faces into lives that we saw almost every day. From this, proximity and common experience fostered friendships of familiarity.
Many of my closest friends, I will likely never see again. Orders brought us together. Life directions spread us back apart. We were told to go here, and we went. We were ordered to do this, and we did. For as much stress some perceive to exist in a martial life, much of it comes with little care. When you resign yourself, making peace with uncertainty, life isn’t hard. Stresses are not so much present in the average moment as they are when you try after to put it all into context with consequences that did nor did not happen. There is something nothing will ever touch between ones you would live and die for. It wasn’t something you had to say. It was something you lived—every day.
I never made a single one of those friends. Fate brought us together, and we became.
I think of that now, in a life that is mostly a cycle from home to work and back again. Time passes, and when the day is done, I don’t want to go out—especially not to a night scene that is not my life. How do you make friends? Where do you go to find people wanting to learn someone like you?
I try to make friends, but I couldn’t tell if I’m doing it right. When it feels like work, does it not, too, feel forced? I’ve never held a friendship that felt driven by compulsions or obligation. That, to me, is not friendship.
Friendship is Love. Love comes of free will. Force is not a factor.
Maybe I’m doing it wrong. Maybe friends are not for me to make. Perhaps I should live still with patience, permitting the world to work as it’s always seemed to do: bringing someone new into a life—at the right time, in the right place, and circumstance—and a friendship becomes.
In becoming, a friendship is not made. A friendship is not willed by force or drive that something should be. In becoming, a friendship simply is; as if it has always been and was always meant to be. These, for me, are the ones that last.