Right from the time we enter into this world as babies, till the time we end up becoming adults and wither away with passing age and time, friendships or relationships seem to form or occupy a greater aspect of our day to day lives. What is worth noting is that at each and every stage of our lives- there appears to be a transition in the friendships or relationships that we forge. For instance, when we are small, our first friends are our mothers, fathers, sisters- in short our immediate family. As we grow, it then moves on to our immediate family to also include our close relatives and near and dear ones. As we reach the anti-climax of our lives (the adolescent phase), there seems to be a drastic shift into who we prioritize as our close friends. A major transition is apparent in the fact that we shift our focus and attention from our parents and close family, to our peers who due to similarities in age as well as interests- form a greater part in determining our priorities and the choices that we make going ahead in life. Interestingly, within this phase itself, we are going though multiple cycles of knitting and forging new friend groups, closing old ones, opening new ones, closing old ones, opening new ones and the cycle keeps going till we reach adulthood where again we are joining new friend groups with people at workplace and abandoning the old friend groups or friends we might have made back in college or school.
What is really worth taking note of in all these instances, is that none of the friend groups that we ever make end up being permanent. There might be at the most only 1 out of 5 or 10 cases where some of the friends we might have made at some point of our lives still remain as true friends, whereas in the majority of cases- the friends that we make end up leaving us as we move ahead in subsequent stages of our lives. This truly highlights the 'impermanent nature' or the 'impermanence' of the friendships that we make as we sail across each and every passing stage of our lives.
This also goes to show in a major part, quite surprisingly if I were to state it that- we are the sole masters and owners of our lives, and in the end, the choices we make, the decisions we take, the goals that we all have in mind have a major part in helping us become who we are meant to be. This is definitely a realization that I have personally come to terms with at some point in my own life itself, as I started to realize that each person on this planet has a definite set of goals or interests that matter to them the most, and when we come in contact with them through the different stages of our lives, we are on our part making friends with them while at the same time- sharing the common interest or circumstance that binds us together along with possibly many other factors that to some extent are related to our own personal lives individually. But once we have crossed that certain stage, we are no longer able to associate with them, and again find a new set of friends who share the same goals we have while at the same time are individually at different stages of their lives. This is a constant and continuous cycle of what we would generally refer to as the 'life journey'.
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