Friendship is a wonderful thing!
Looking up Friendship on Wikipedia you will see this, introduction included: –
- Friendship is a relationship of mutual affection between people. It is a stronger form of interpersonal bond than an association, and has been studied in academic fields such as communication, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, and philosophy, social exchange theory, equity theorem relational dialects, and attachment styles
- Although there are many forms of friendship, some of which may vary from place to place, certain characteristics are present in many types of such bonds. Such characteristics include affection, kindness, love, virtue, sympathy, empathy honesty, altruism, loyalty, generosity, forgiveness, mutual understanding and compassion, and enjoyment of each other’s company, trust, and the ability to be oneself, express one’s feelings to others, and make mistakes without fear of judgment from the friend. Friendship is an essential aspect of relationship building skills.
Well that is a lot to say about friendship.
I have the pleasure and wonder to have many friends. I won’t use actual names but I want to honor so many friends I have, not that I could include them all here. I won’t include all of them.
I have noted that my oldest friends are from my earliest days at my first job, the remnants of which I still hold 45 years later.
JL, BJH and JS were among the first people I met working at Buck, JL was the best man at our wedding in 1977. I still communicate regularly with BJH, who lives in New Hampshire.
JS lives in Connecticut with her husband, I last saw them at my 60th birthday party 8 years ago.
We visited BJH in New Hampshire a few times year’s back when she had a group of cabins for rental we speak and communicate via email on occasion.
YCK I know from later years at Buck, she is married to CK, they currently live in the Los Angeles area of California. We visited them in California last year, or I should say we visited YCK, CK was in the hospital at the time.
KPS was my boss at one point of my career and since he retired about 5 years ago we have kept in touch and become friends. We visited him in his vacation home when we were in the Outer Banks the last 5 years. He is married to TS and they enjoy the Outer Banks longer than we do, we did three weeks this year, which was great.
DLS I met on the first outsourcing project I worked on, it was the Mobil implementation, KPS was the account executive, I was the project manager and DLS was the requirements writer. This was the early days of outsourcing and we were developing the procedures as we went along the way. DLS and I became friends and have a nice routine of writing to each other every day, now that I am partially retired we use our personal emails. We have been to her wedding and bat mitzvah of their daughters.
DS is a friend I have known for many years, we worked together when I was in the Practice Leadership Group at the company – this was around 2014, for a few years. We became friends because of our mutual deep DB Knowledge, he being very strong on regulations and administration and me being an actuary with varying experience in consulting, actuarial work and administration. We shared ideas and our work challenges with a brute of a boss we had at the time. We found we shared several things around family, gardening and life’s challenges. We share love of country but are polar opposites politically.
Here in town today I have several friends from the DBSA Succasunna group, from the garden and the neighbors I have met from distributing cookies this year. Also the ladies that I shopped for have become friends for the most part.
Friends complete us and complement us, hold us in check and are fun to talk with and visit.
They are the fabric of our lives and keep us focused and help us in the hard times when they do come.
Enjoy your friends!!!