Essay #3: An Important Friend

Mary Brown Parlee in her article “The Friendship Bond” reported the results of a research conducted on the readers of a certain magazine on the matters of friendship. She reported that most of the respondents agree that trust, honesty, support and understanding, confiding, and helping each other are the most important matters involving friends. This easily shows that many different people similarly treasure friendship in their life. Distinguishing whether a person is a dear friend or “just another friend”, however, is a difficult feat, but friendship is always an important element in anyone’s life.

The boundaries between “best friend”, “friend”, and “not friend” are never clear, but it always exists. In fact, I believe that it is a continuous spectrum, and the actual borders of level of friendship are dependent on the person perceiving the relationship. The boundaries are even also varying as time passes and people’s minds change. One can call anyone he or she knows a friend while another can claim to have no friends at all, only a lot of acquaintances. However, in general we can identify the level of friendship someone is having. 

Among the seven billion people in this world, most of which we would not know at all, we would have to select a few special people which we can entrust something on. It would be an absolutely pointless effort to, say, select a random person and ask him or her to keep our crime a secret. Therefore, one good parameter of friendship is the level of trust. Only a good friend can be trusted with an important information or task. The friend’s response, whether that friend betrays that trust or not is a very crucial matter that will decide between he or she is a friend or not.

Another parameter which we can use to measure the quality of friendship is how casual one is acting around his or her friends. Less close friends tend to be very polite, perhaps because they are seeking acceptance and afraid of losing it. However, a close friend will dare to go into his or her friend’s room and wreak havoc in it without even asking, and only good friends can badmouth and hit each other without anyone actually getting angry. Best friends can usually take acceptance for granted and may start to act stupid and childish. In other words, the more casual a friend is acting, the more she or he accepts us as a friend.

Friendship is something brittle and precious, much alike a glass ornament. Indeed, it is an ornament in the sense of decorating one’s life. One can live a life without a friend, but the life will be empty, colorless, if not dark, lacking of beauty. Lack of friendship is not by any means lethal, but friendship fills the life like no other can do, thus making it unique and precious. However, as beautiful it is, friendship is also fragile; it is easily broken by betrayal and egoistical actions. I myself have hard time making friends, and I also realize that this is partly caused by the “brittle” trait of friendship; I don’t understand how to make friends, and I am afraid of making ones that I never actually trust. Therefore I act with pretense, thinking that it is difficult, if even possible, to make an ideally good friend that will never leave however wrong my deeds are. Friendship is precious for life, but only an ideal friendship can last a lifetime.

The quality of a friendship is greatly determined by the opinions of the person perceiving the friendship itself, thus rendering the concept itself difficult to measure. The boundaries defining who is a friend and who is not are also never clearly decided, but it is the ultimate truth that friendship is very important in life. Preferring quality over quantity, I would like to invite all of us to make good friends, good enough to outmatch other hundreds of friends. Let us be good friends! 

Essay #4: Overly Courteous

I remember the day I attended the opening ceremony of a new semester as a university freshman. Everyone around was busy making friends with many people they had just met, the people that they would be studying together with for the next few years. Each time they exchanged names, they shook hands and smiled to each other. Those were all good and courteous introductions, but I felt as if something was strange: the first time I made friends during preschool, I do not remember asking a stranger their name while shaking hands. In fact, I cannot recall clearly how we made friends, and somehow everyone was already in good terms with each other. If children can be friends that easily, I thought to myself, why would we need to act very courteous to each other? I see that while courtesy grew from the demand of the society, it can also hinder budding friendship and create relationship wall among people.

The existence of courteous actions comes from the fact that people we mostly meet in society are people that we do not know. However, we have to act in such a way so that we do not initiate any conflict and so that we will be able to please others. In order to accomplish this, a set of rules of society is established so that people can refer to these rules when in doubt of what is generally considered a good or courteous action and what is not. In some culture, it is important to show courtesy to someone who lent us a car by filling the car with fuel before returning it. This is an unwritten rule that is expected of everyone, and indeed most people will agree that this is an act of courtesy because it relieves the car owner of the need to refill his car’s tank. However, whether the deed itself is actually courteous or not ultimately depends on each person’s perspective. The car owner, an odd one perhaps, might complain that the fuel used to fill his car’s tank does not fulfill his standards and feel offended because we might have damaged his car! Therefore, rules of courtesy are important, but they are not everything when it comes to relationships.

How we interact with others has a great impact on what they think we think of them. If we start calling someone using the title “Mr.”, thinking that it is generally more polite to do so, he will probably think that we respect him and we think of him as someone that possesses a higher social status so that it is more difficult for us to approach him. That in turn will make him try to approach us instead, but still without dissolving the vertical relationship, which makes the relationship somewhat rigid. Human relationships can be this complicated, but simply put, if we start acting very courteous to someone, he or she will recognize that we do not open ourselves to a close friendship with him or her.

Acting based solely on courtesy is equivalent to building a relationship wall between us and other people, because whenever we interact with others, we are acting as “a courteous member of society”, not as who we actually are. This courteous persona then stands in as a bridge, or rather, a wall between our real character and the people we are interacting with. There was a custom in my previous high school where all students were expected to greet a teacher briefly whenever they met one. We had this courteous habit for 3 years. Whenever we see a teacher while passing by the faculty office, in the corridors, or in the restrooms, the first thing that came to mind is always to greet “good morning” or “good afternoon”. When we received something from a teacher, it would be a “thank you”. However, the excessive usage of those words made me wonder if we were actually meaning what we are saying. Those greetings were often said with uninterested face, showing that the act of greeting was solely done out of obligation, not out of good will. Acting courteous as what the society demands, it seems, is equivalent to wearing a mask. It is a mask that provides convenience, but repels true connection with other people, a lonely mask with a smiling face on it.

The act of good manner and courtesy appears out of the need of good relationship between members of society. However, the excessive usage and overly rigid implementation of courtesy rules will bring out the contrary: they loosen relationships and create distance between people. Therefore we should be able to freely choose when to act courteous and understand the real reason within those actions so that we will not be trapped in the grand play called “social life”. Last but not least, I would like to quote a line from a song by Achmad Albar: “Mengapa kita bersandiwara?”, “Why do we pretend?”