From My Dateless Dairy: A Farewell Note from Joe’s Father: A Primer on childhood/school friendship

On June 29th, 2002 I wrote this Farewell Note to my daughter’s friend on her way to the United States to pursue her higher studies. This letter sum up the essence of childhood friendship, which every one of us want to cherish and reflect upon.

In less than a fortnight, your scheduled flight to the U.S.-the dreamland for the young will take place. All of us would miss your company and feel the absence terribly. And yet we know that the U.S. trip is most welcome for two reasons;
i) Your stay at the U.S. would blanket you with mother’s love and care.
ii) That dreamland will provide you more opportunities and challenges for upward academic mobility and growth.
By reflecting and ruminating over that pleasant prospect, we all feel terribly happy.

From Pre-K.G. to school final, we confront and coexist with a host of friends. Continually, some slip in and a few slip out. Towards the end, only a select few-a truly blessed man a handful remains to comfort our heart and soul. Yes! Nature has its own mysterious ways of filtering meticulously and bestowing more mercifully both spark of love and a hand of friendship. What ultimately remains is a distilled essence of pure love-the innocent unaccusing love and affection.

The Economics and Politics, including the Chemistry and Physics behind the veil of entry and exit of that friendship, are indeed very difficult to unravel. In the never ending journey of life, it is also difficult to say who is our good friend and to what extent we are to others. If you are able to hold on to the childhood school friends even at the old age, you must be a gifted one.

All said and done, any adjective will be a poor substitute to exemplify both the utility and value of school friendship. A series of continual misunderstanding or wrong way of communications of feelings and sometime a short term estrangement in relationship may take place due to inadequacy of love or excess of it. And yet the school friendship is always warm, intimate and enveloping. It will always have a calm and pacifying presence in life.

At the time of parting, we don’t say good-bye, as the word is conventionally associated with sadness. Instead, all of us would like to lock up all the pleasant memories about you, deep into our heart and just rejoice over it. Any separation, any delinking, which takes place in a spontaneous fashion must be for the ultimate good and we should learn to live with it and profit by it.

Before I end this farewell note, shall I quote a passage from a book written by Herbert Welch, the Bishop of Methodist Church, in his hundredth year:

“God has not made a world in which security and ease and happiness are the highest attainments; but rather a world of watchfulness, for work, for struggle, and for suffering as a normal part of the full life.

I see to my comfort, that God has established a society, not of pleasant puppets and happy playboys, but of men and women whose characters have been shaped through conflicts, doubts, hardships and perhaps defeats. Life, as god planned it is not to be a nursery for coddling of perpetual infants, but a school for adult education”.

The ancient Thirukkural sums up the essence of life in the same vein
Simply translated, those who do not crave for sensual pleasures/materialistic life and who know that suffering is the spice of life, do not suffer.

Best Wishes for a Productive Academic life