As at 26 year old, it\u2019s interesting to look back on my relationships with other people when I was younger, and to think about what friendship meant then, and what it means now, and how my concept of it has changed over the years. It\u2019s also interesting to juxtapose that against what I see and witness around me. I was reading something on Meaningness about a phenomenon where young people get into little cliques or groups that become very important to their identity. And I definitely experienced that, even though I was never very good at it. I don\u2019t remember very much about my earliest friendships\u2013 a lot of it is memory which might have been modified over years of reimagining and recreation. I don\u2019t remember very much about the friends I must\u2019ve had in kindergarten, but I must have had some. I vaguely recall another indian boy named Dayalan, but I have no idea where he is now or what he\u2019s up to. I wonder if he remembers me, or thinks of me. I remember there was a chinese boy too, I can\u2019t remember his name, but I went to his house once. I borrowed pencils from somebody. I can\u2019t remember.<\/p>\n
And then we went to primary school, and I have a few memories of the kids I mingled with then. I vaguely remember an adventure we had to the back of the school garden. I remember going for touch typing lessons in the school\u2019s computer club. I remember rolling coins across a passageway during recess, I remember running to the canteen to play Galaga on the computers that were there. I remember being terrified of getting into trouble after losing a workbook. I remember playing on the monkey bars after school. I remember my older buddy (I was 7, he was 9) showing me how to slide down a railing, which I thought was cool. I remember getting mistakenly scolded by a teacher for someone else\u2019s shoddy work. I remember being scolded as a group for being too noisy, and standing in the sun far too long one day because our teacher hadn\u2019t showed up after recess or something like that. I remember there were two bells at the end of recess \u2013 the first was a signal to stop where you were, and the second was to head to the assembly area. And some of us had great fun \u201cstopping\u201d in weird freeze frames. I remember going to a friend\u2019s house to play computer games \u2013 that\u2019s where I discovered Metal Slug and Red Alert. I remember making a new group of friends later on when we changed school again. I had a friend I\u2019d meet once a year or so and we\u2019d go to play video games together at the arcade at Tampines. And once I went to his house and we played Smackdown for a while. All these memories now seem so elusive. I remember playing Diablo 2 at a couple of friends\u2019 houses. I actually took a Barbarian all the way to completion at one friend\u2019s house. I wonder why we did that. I wonder why he encouraged me to do that. And his parents seemed to be quite okay with it. I try to put myself in the parents\u2019 shoes now\u2026 I guess it\u2019s nice for them to see a child having a social life of sorts. I invited friends to my place too to play video games \u2013 usually metal slug. Sometimes we\u2019d watch TV. There is something nice, isn\u2019t there, about kids exploring? Learning about themselves through the eyes of others.<\/p>\n
And what\u2019s amazing I think is realizing that all of us have different contexts, different realities. Of course, just by being in the same country, same city, we\u2019re going to have a lot of things in common. Shared contexts. But there are also things that are very different. And looking back, it was so interesting to visit the homes of others. Actually, visiting another person\u2019s home is always an interesting, trippy experience. To realize that the common spaces you inhabit aren\u2019t all of what make that person who they are. Everybody has their own unique identity, personality, configuration, and they\u2019re born into different circumstances, inhabit different spaces, experience different feedback loops, and effectively become very different beings, different patterns in spacetime that dance around one another. Sometimes we collide into one another in ways that could be described as damaging \u2013 we experience pain and anger and frustration and suffering \u2013 but all of that, in some sense, when you zoom out \u2013 can often be seen as a way of us becoming ourselves, of our patterns getting more interesting, more self-aware, and so on.<\/p>\n
The cue I used to start this vomit was \u201closing friends\u201d, and I think I wanted to reflect about the people who are no longer in my life, or who have closed themselves off to me because of my failures, weaknesses, incompetence, ignorance, ugliness. Or sometimes it\u2019s just circumstances; sometimes the winds and tides bring ships to different seas and that\u2019s just the way we go. Nobody has the right to demand that others remain around them \u2013 everybody should go wherever is right for them, according to what they think and feel is best. And of course there\u2019s a process there, and people make mistakes and so on\u2026 but the point is \u2026 it\u2019s all okay, as long as we\u2019re learning and growing and becoming. I do have many fond memories that I am grateful for \u2013 perhaps I\u2019m not grateful enough. Maybe I\u2019m not yet old enough to spend too much time reflecting and reminiscing. But I\u2019ve had some good times.<\/p>\n
Far more interesting, I think, is to think about all the friends I haven\u2019t met yet. I\u2019m hopefully only a third or quarter into my life (or a fifth!), and so there are probably hundreds of interesting people I don\u2019t even know of yet, maybe people who aren\u2019t even born yet, people who will become important and significant to me, who will have a lot to teach me, who will make me laugh and cry, will challenge me, support me, build me up, break me down, so on and so forth. And all of that is part of the grand adventure, and I need to open up so that I can welcome them into my life. I need to pay attention, look out far and wide, send out signals, messages in bottles so that my many-faced soulmates can find me and come to me. And we can have a nice evening togeher before our souls are extinguished in the inevitable long night of the universe. And it would\u2019ve been a good time. That was all that ever mattered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As at 26 year old, it\u2019s interesting to look back on my relationships with other people when I was younger, and to think about what friendship meant then, and what it means now, and how my concept of it has changed over the years. It\u2019s also interesting to juxtapose that… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[396,334],"class_list":["post-10259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-word-vomit","tag-death","tag-peopling"],"yoast_head":"\n