I spent all day trying to think about how to attack this blog topic, and nothing really worthy of discussion came to mind to me, until I finished having a conversation with someone I hadn’t seen in a very long time, when lights really began to flicker back on.
Relationships, in all forms, will continue to be a facet of your life until your ultimate departure from this world. Life, being a collection of experiences you share with the people you meet along the way, is made up of relationships and the miscellaneous tidbits they entail. We have choices involved with everyone we meet, and the outcomes of those choices ultimatley shape our lives. Our friends, our family, our peers, our colleagues, our partners, our significant others, we have so many relationships with so many people, each having their own function in life.
That said, I’ve taken a lot of those relationships for granted, not purposefully, but in the absence of the wisdom to see the true roles of these relationships in my ongoing life. When you move out of your house, for instance, you tend to see your parents in a different light. Maybe some of the things they tell you back as a kid start to really shine through, make sense, applicable to your surroundings. Maybe you start to see your friends from ‘back home’ more as true friends or find out they weren’t really that close to begin with. All sorts of relationships go under transitions, and they go under them all the time.
You remember your friends back home? Did you make new ones at college? Are the bonds that hold you together any different than the bonds that held you to friends you had in high school?
I joined a fraternity at college. It was one of the best decisions I could have made, and I’ll never back down from that. Leaving what you think you know about fraternities aside, I’ve learned so much as a person, about how to forge relationships with other people, how to assess situations on grand scale without hesitation. When we started our “pledge period” (more simply, the beginning of our training to become active brothers of the fraternity), we were 27 kids who had no idea about each other, couldn’t name each other in a room if we tried. 2 months and a lot of hard work, triumphs and failures later, we’ve become a family of people. We had to learn to trust each other on simple basis that “we were here for the same reasons”, and we learned to accept that. We learned that friends don’t leave friends behind, we’re only as strong as our weakest friend, so we all must become stronger. We are friends, we are a group of like-minded individuals with purpose. We come from all different walks, creeds, backgrounds, and lives to come together under a unanimous relationship of brotherhood without fault. We stand on common principal and a universally agreed set of truths that set us apart from all others, we are all equal on every plane. Those bonds, that sort of relationship, had never even been fathomed in my mind before I did it. It made me rethink my person as a whole, how I live, what I want to become, how to talk to 27 random people you don’t know and become friends. It redefined the ‘friends’ sort of relationship to me.
I fought with my parents a lot. I disagreed with what my mom would always yell at me for, because I had to, it’s like it was hardwired into my brain as a teenager that I had to fight my parents in some long lasting crusade for righteousness or something… I didn’t really understand what they were telling me until I got out on my own. When I left my parents house I was scared, afraid I’d lose the comfortability of always knowing I’d have a roof over my head, food in the cupboard and people to talk to. While I did ultimately lose comfortability of knowing someone else was taking care of all of that for me, it opened my eyes to see all of the advice and teachings my parents instilled to me come to light, in practice. I saw why my mom always told me to clean up after myself as opposed to relying on the “maid who scrubs the dishes” or “maid who cleans up the bathroom”. When I saw how much I had to really bite the bullet and clean up after my roommate much like my mother did for me before, I understood what she meant. I understood what my dad meant by “responsibility for your actions”, and I respected everything they said a whole lot more afterwards. This has redefined my ‘family’ relationships.
These events are only two of the countless things that have occurred to me, revelations I’ve had or experiences I’ve lived out as a result of a major life change. My relationships with the people I held the closest change, and always will, but the most important thing is that you can learn from relationships with people, and always forge new ones and repair ones once lost. You’ll learn about relationships from all places in life, like how The Royal Tannenbaums makes an awesome poke at relationships in general, and how intertwined and connected they are, and movies like that will teach me a broader picture of relationships and how to handle them. Relationships make us grow, and are necessary in life, cherish each one you have and learn from them forever.
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