True Friends and Tears of Joy

Time flies when we are enjoying the company of friends both established and new.  Five days in the Baltimore area brought increasing levels of fun and contentment.  True friendship is deep and enduring, unlike surface beauty that can be fabricated with the right combinations of cosmetics.  True beauty radiates from the soul; filling hearts with love and kindness.  That’s the most recent five days I experienced with established and new friends.

Caring isn’t difficult to deliver.  In fact, empathy and sympathy are important ingredients for the complete emotional person.  There’s no room for callousness, dismissiveness or feelings that express inhumanity.  Yes we’ve all experienced those who self-justify actions that we find offensive, deplorable or downright mean.

Being the object of destructive humor is a sad reality of this self-absorbed society.  Let me take a selfie or worse, let me use the camera in my phone to record someone’s actions without their knowledge.  Oh, and for fun I’ll share it with my friends for a good laugh or post it on a social media site.  That’s going to be so much fun!  This is wrong for so many reasons.  Invasion of privacy, intrusion upon personal space, betraying someone you look in the eye and call ‘friend’ or ‘colleague’.  Where will it end?

It doesn’t have to be propagated.  It can end with us.  There are ways to express displeasure with such actions and if the perpetrator doesn’t understand, then that person will be cast to the nether regions of our world.

All this to say you know who you can trust and who must be kept at arms’ length.  Even when you discover a friend has done something untoward, betrayed a trust or violated what you considered inviolate, you try to understand.  Sometimes you can explain it away as ‘it’s the way they are’.  Other times ‘the way they are’ can be forgiven if there is an apology and the best type of contrition – never repeating what should never have been done in the first place.  Then there’s the angst of pulling that person’s thread from the fabric of your life.  It hurts but extraction may be the only solution to the problem.

I love my friends, the ones to whom I can hand my heart and know when it returns it will be fuller and more healthy than when I relinquished it.  That was what I experienced this weekend.  I cried a few times; just as I’m doing now.  The tears of joy bolster me.  Sounds funny, huh?  But it’s true.  I express emotion in ways that some may find odd.  Well, I never considered myself to be mainstream; a little off kilter at times but true and loyal. 

Have a wonderful day and hug a true friend today.  They may be taken aback by your actions but they will embrace you and both will feel something amazing pass between you.

Love and hugs, Nikki DiCaro