One Degree of Connection

I am fascinated by friendships. Not the acquaintances you see occasionally or the Facebook friends who wouldn’t recognize you on the street. But, the real people; the people who know and are in peace with the deepest parts of you. They’re the kind of people you can talk to about how hard it’s been to compose yourself lately or what’s really going on in your life. They’re the kind of people you call for a ride when you get a flat tire and they’re the ones who affirm and support all the “weird” things about you that make other people uncomfortable. They are the kind of people whom you can call at 4 AM in the morning, talk any crap and they understand it. I’m so very fascinated by deep, meaningful friendships like these because for most of my life, I’ve had only a very few. And these few good friends are the only ones whom I spend a lot of time with. We celebrate birthdays, analyze boyfriend behavior, and discuss the pros and cons of the haircut of the season.

My speculated this degree of connection is sort of a corollary of the Theory of Six Degrees of Separation. For people who are not aware of this theory, Six Degrees of Separation is a theory which states that 'anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries.' Meaning that everyone and everything is six or fewer steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world. But according to the constitution of my beliefs we live in a human world, where personality, lifestyle choices, and values determine the way we live and relate to others. By taking human factor into consideration and being a little practical, we must acknowledge that some relationships bring fluidity and symmetry to our hearts more easily and quickly than others. Once I faced the fact that there is something called true profound best friendships, the prominent challenge was: Do I have any best friends? Do I really have any 4 A.M. friends? Are there people I know who can fit into my little orbit of weirdness? If not, then what the hell have I been thinking all this while?
After a little bit of contemplation something flashed into my mind:
We are all a little weird, and life’s a little weird, and when we find people whose weirdness is compatible to ours, we join up with them and get into mutual weirdness to form a bond and call it ‘friendship’.
So I buckled up and put myself to the job of finding the people with complimentary weirdness which would fit into my territory of friendship. I turned my Friend Radar to full tilt. I prowled the corners of the interwebs and relentlessly picked the brains of people I knew, all in an attempt to identify my ‘best’ friends. I was determined to find the friends who I could talk openly with about my ideologies (which are unarguably unreasonable!) and how they processed every decision I made. And I wanted these same weird-minded friends to adore my sometimes-10-year-old sense of humor, my introversion, and my devotion to not-so-sensible beliefs on certain things. Uncommonness, down to earth, unmelodious singing and talking through facial expressions by emitting invisible rays of meaning; sounds like the duality of a perfect friendship to me, which is why with genuine sense of gratitude I thank every day that I have had the distinct pleasure of sharing my life events with such people. These friends are now my extended family who have made me so much more of a practical dreamer, a bit methodical, more humble and to a certain extend further crazier. My friends and their friendships have changed my outlook on various aspects of life which I eternally will be thankful for. Although I should mention that it wasn’t that easy actually, to connect with them in one go. It took us a while to click with each other and understand the gravity of our friendship during the thick and thins, but these are the friendships that have turned me into what I am today. As much as our culture waxes on and on about romantic love, some praise needs to be sent over to the true friends who hold us up through it all. The love that comes from your own, custom-made community of kinfolk is vital. Nothing can really be more nourishing.

I can keep writing on this, but it makes more sense to sum up this degree of connection with the entire friendship mechanism in one single sentence; You can have innumerable friends all around you, but it is very important to find the uncommon commonness between each other to experience the best friendships of your life; and which usually begins unexpectedly!