BY SOFO ARCHON
Modern psychological research is proving again and again the importance of having friends in our lives. Statistics clearly point out the fact that people who have friends are more happy and have an overall increased well-being than those who don’t have friends.
In the journey of life, we all happen to travel with other people. We are social beings and need to be in the presence of others. Many times, however, those who we choose to spend our life with can have an immensely negative impact on us. Therefore we should be very careful when it comes to choosing friends, so that we surround ourselves with those who help us find happiness, instead of those who contribute to our suffering.
Do Your Friends Lift You Up
Or Bring You Down?
There are two kinds of people: those who burden us and those who uplift us.
Those who burden us are those who we don’t truly resonate with, who don’t have a similar mindset to ours, who we can’t truly communicate heart to heart with, who don’t understand us and who we don’t feel connected with. Those people are making our lives more complicated, and, whether they realize it or not are putting obstacles on our way to happiness instead of helping us reach quicker to it.
Those who uplift us are the people we can consider as true friends. They are those who can understand us and connect with us on a deep level. They are those who care for us, love us, and wish us the best in life, doing their best to help us grow into the best version of ourselves. Those are the people with whom life can be turned into an amazing journey, filled with joy, love, and freedom.
Obviously, if you desire to live happily, you should surround yourself with those who lift your soul up and not with those who bring it down. But how can this be achieved?
Finding True Friendship
We are living in a culture where people have become alienated from one another. Most of us feel lonely in a cold world that we think is separate from ourselves and possibly threatening to our well-being. Hence we don’t dare to come close to our fellow human beings, afraid that we will risk getting hurt by them. And, in one sense, that’s a logical choice, considering how competitive people have become with one another. But, on the other hand, we miss out on the beauty of friendship.
To me, even if we risk being hurt by others, there’s no point in living closed to ourselves and feeling lonely, afraid to connect, love, and communicate with people. We all deep down desire to feel connected, but we’re living in a way that prevents us from forming intimate relationships. We’ve built big walls all around ourselves so people cannot approach us and come in touch with us. We’re doing everything we can to avoid communicating and sharing our being with others. Or we communicate only on a superficial level, without sharing our true thoughts and feelings.
It’s time to break down those walls and come closer to each other. It’s time to stop feeling lonely and instead start feeling connected. Of course, I am not saying that we should spend our lives with any person we come across — instead, we should pick and choose carefully the ones we feel most connected with. But in order to do so, we first need to let go of those ones who we don’t connect with, even if we’ve spent all of our past together, and open our hearts to embrace new people that we meet in our life’s journey.
Friendship is a sacred thing, and once we learn to be true friends, our life is going to be completely transformed, in a tremendously positive way.
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