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“Who are your current favourite people?”
Today’s daily prompt by Word Press made me snort. What makes them think I have any?
But then I pondered the question.
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What makes a person special?
No doubt the answer to that varies.
As far as I am concerned, you could throw out anyone who is narrow-minded or judgmental, for a start.
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Dishonest? Obviously, toss them out.
And I have no time for the miserly, mean-spirited or prejudiced.
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Nor for people who would push me to bend to their will. I respect everyone’s right to their own opinion and need it to be reciprocal in a friend.
This means I don’t only care for people who are like me. How dull life would be if we were all the same.
My only requirement is that a person be honest, kind-hearted, generous of spirit and open-minded.
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It is especially nice if a person trusts you enough to speak their mind, as I detest guessing-games.
Of course trust is something that has to be earned and protected, like respect.
When you move about a lot, you tend to lose track of individuals that you may have thought of as friends.
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Particularly in this modern world, everyone is busily focused on keeping up, so people lose touch. I am not offended by it. I have a small number of friends who contact me rarely, but they will always be important to me.
The fact that such people remember me over long stretches of time and distance touches me.
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But these days I have another group of people who are important to me. I have never met them but I know I would like them and it amuses me to imagine them all assembled for a get-together.
What fun it would be to have all my blog-world friends meet up! Though it would take some coordinating.
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Truth is, I’ve always been hopeless at social functions, the opposite of my mother in every way.
Yet there have been times…
My first year in college, I received an invitation to tea from a sorority, something I barely knew anything about. I was urged to attend and it was easier to go than to deal with my uncle’s displeasure if I refused.
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Next thing you know, I was a sorority sister which turned out to be helpful as I was thus able to get a grant to help pay my college fees.
More daunting was being made something called Rush Chairman.
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Here I should explain that it was a Southern sorority and extremely unpopular in 1965, so the Long Island chapter was in danger of disappearing, therefore invitations were sent to vast numbers of freshman students who mostly ignored them.
The position of Rush Chairman was no great reward. Basically we all had to do something.
So I got the job of recruiting and arranging parties. Oh my. Still, I did it. It seems that when I have to, I can.
Many, many years later I arranged a 50th birthday party for someone special and a few years after that, I organised a couple of retirement parties, but it simply came down to choosing the right venue and putting it all in the right hands.
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The fact is, those parties were for friends and for friends, you can do anything.
I never see those WordPress prompts, but I agree with you that some people in our blogging community would qualify as favourite people. I still have my oldest friends of course, some from my first year at secondary school, and then my late teens once I started work. They qualify as my favourite people as well, because we have so many shared memories.
Best wishes, Pete.
This resonates so, so much with me. Having left home at 16, and then travelled the world, moving every 6/9/13 months, 2/3/4 years, and eventually settling in an area away from where I was born and schooled, I am far from conventional when it comes to family and friends relationships. The fact that I married my best friend’s girlfriend had a slight effect too!
Interesting.
I like the qualities you want to see in your friends (and wholeheartedly agree with all of them too). I think it would be lovely to be at a party with you – just remember to take out all your photos so I can ask you all kinds of questions while looking through them 😄.
We are a small group of friends who have known each other for many years. These days we don’t see each other that often because we live 1000km away, but luckily there are airplanes (and long road trips) that make sure we keep in touch.