The Things You Need

I was thinking, today, about how life is often funny. I don’t mean a “ha, ha” kind of funny, but funny in a strange way. I’m not revealing any great truth by saying this; greater minds than mine have pondered this thought in years past, and even more will ponder it in the years to come.

Today, my thoughts turned toward friendship. I am a shy person, and I always have been.  When you add introversion to a feeling of worthlessness, it becomes difficult to make friends and nearly impossible to believe that anyone would care for me or my friendship. When you feel you have nothing to offer, you tend to look upon most of the world with suspicion, and I think being shy heightens this tendency.

Even so, I have been lucky in that I have managed, along the way, to make friends. Very good, dependable friends. The funny thing about it all is that, often, it seems life doesn’t bring the people you think you want. Instead, it brings the people you need. That person, who is too loud or tells off-color jokes, which embarrass you at first … or the one who doesn’t want to meet your eyes, so that you have to struggle to make conversation … or even the person who seems, at first blush, to despise you.

I have met people, along the highways and by-ways of my life, who seemed the most unlikely candidates for friendship. In some instances, I felt I had nothing in common with them. At other times, it would seem I might get swallowed up in the hugeness of their personalities. Or, maybe it seemed they had nothing to offer me. For whatever reason, I thought, at the time of meeting them, that I would never want to seek out a friendship.

But, with the passage of time … and once I learned to look below the surface and see with the eyes of friendship and love, I found something worth more than anything else in the universe: the dearest of friends.