On friendships, relationships, and some things in between.

It was last year, through the course of 2011, that it really sunk in, how confusing and difficult the simplest things in life can be. The lessons that we ought to have learnt in childhood (and thought we did), had to be learnt all over again. On academics, how important it is to study everyday and not to let your backlog build up. On health, how simple it can be if we just eat sensibly, and manage to set aside 15 minutes everyday to exercise.
All the things that our parents, teachers, and well wishers have been telling us since we were kids, and we always assumed will come to us naturally. But then, if it were so easy, then everyone in the world would be successful and fit. But it's not and they aren't. So it has to be conscious choice followed by continuous effort.

But what struck me most forcibly throughout the year was the struggle of inter-personal relations, whether it be friendships, relationships or marriage. Everyone appeared to be going through a phase of transition, where they had to redefine their priorities and expectations, as if suddenly realizing that the world was not the place they imagined it to be. Like they had spent years dreaming of flying, and suddenly discovered that gravity can a bit of a problem. This same story..everywhere. The message was clear.. 'Real Life'  has begun.
And this is me, trying to understand its implications.

It all starts with Friendship... It is at the core of any meaningful interaction with another living thing. Whatever be the nature of the relationship, or the name we've given to it, it's strength is ultimately measured in terms of our friendship. The closer we get to our family, our parents, siblings, even our pet dog, the more they seem as friends. Love inevitably begins and ends in friendship, while friendship, by it's pure nature, grows into love. And it is up to us to choose if, when and how we express this love. And this is where people start getting confused.

As kids in school, we had a pretty neat classification system, where everyone we knew fell into a category. Parents and teachers fell broadly into the 'Authority' category, while our siblings, cousins and classmates fell into the 'Kids our age' category. The latter was subdivided into three- Like, Dislike, and Don't really care. And while this worked perfectly well then, as we grew older, we were forced to make changes to our little system, to make room for relationships that didn't quite fit any of the columns. Some of them didn't even have names, just vague emotions, that were getting more and more difficult to describe in our limited language. But we bravely stuck to our old methods, adding more sub-categories, categories, special columns without titles, some with only a question mark. Eventually, there is a conflict, between our instinctive need to define something and our inability to do so. And conflict causes confusion.

If you accept that each human being is different, it follows that every relationship must be so as well, and as such, should ideally have a different name. The problem is that we ran out of names sometime in the 16th century, and since then, have been scrapping about with what we've got. But on the bright side, I believe that the people who are actually involved in the friendship/relationship instinctively know what it is, even if they might not have a name for it. Some of them find a name, some of them change their relationship in order to make it fit to the nearest 'defined' set point, while some just give up on the whole thing, believing that if it doesn't fit perfectly by itself, it can't be right. Of course, there is no right and wrong, and everyone is entitled to their own beliefs. But it is important that they understand why they do somethings and take some decisions, and stop living in confusion.

The problem and the solution lies in our perception. Classifying relationships into broad categories is possible only in childhood, just as how it was necessary and possible to understand the primary and secondary colors in school. But ask any artist to name the number of colors in the world, and he would say that they're innumerable, for any two shades may come together to form a third never before imagined. A violinist would explain how in music, each note could merge to the next so subtly that to most, they sound the same. Yet, to those with a keen ear and an understanding, they sound unique.
In other words, relationships are a spectrum, and the manner in which we break it down is limited only by our understanding of ourselves.
If life used to be in black and white, but is now shrouded in shades of gray, it is not just part of growing up.. Perhaps we're colorblind. And there could be an entire world that we're missing out on.