What is friendship?

When asking AI what the importance of friendship is this is what came up:

‘Friendship is essential for emotional well-being, personal growth, and even physical health, enriching life through support, joy, and connection’.

I have to say I agree, I count myself very fortunate that along my life’s journey I have and continue to pick up good friends along the way. My longest friendship being with one of my best friends who I met on the first day of school, we have maintained our friendship since that day and even though at times we have lived further apart than we do now we have remained in touch always supporting each other through the good and indeed the bad times.

Over my years of travelling and moving around the UK (and Ireland) I have managed to pick up more and I have to say it ‘best friends’, in fact I often relate to people as my old or new friends however as time passes those which were classed in the ‘new friends’ bracket have now become ‘old friends’ now I am not talking age although we have all obviously got older I am talking about the length of time we have indeed supported each other and been there whenever needed.

As described above I believe my friendships hand me all of the above however it is a two-way street and my aim is always to provide these things for others, as they say to ‘have a friend you need to be a friend’.

Being there for those friends in their hour of need helps embrace the closeness of the relationship, miles apart should not matter if the hearts of two friends are close. In today’s world the maintaining of relationships is so much easier that it was, with the use of texting, social media and accessible phones staying in touch is easy. I say accessible phones as back in the days of my youth, friendships relied on finding a phone box, collecting enough 2 or 10p’s to get me through a five minute call or alternatively writing a letter, filling pages of news of my latest adventure. It is good to know now that through all the difficult years of communicating these ways a lot of my friendships have endured the test of time.

I am also lucky to have friends across multi-generations, each bringing their own value to the space, in fact having younger friends is a way of keeping one young as well as having them to explain the forever changing world of technology; having older friends gives you a chance to explore what life was like before your time and those the same age give you shared memories of your youth, each one a winner!

I hope as a reader you have a collection of friends, I hope they form part of your community of support and I hope indeed as I always described each of my close friends they walk in when sometimes it seems the rest of the world walks out.

Here’s to celebrating friendship and all it brings.