Research has found that having friendships help you to live longer and be more fulfilled I suppose it depends on who your friends are!?

I have been very fortunate to have had and still have a variety of very interesting, creative, humorous, intelligent friends.

Good friends listen, and challenge.

A friend loves at all times and in adversity…

Sometimes friends leave us or we leave them. Sometimes friends are for a season or for life.

We all enjoy familiarity, people who know us, we don’t have to keep explaining who we are and how we think. They just ‘get us’ !

Just like the 1989’s sitcom ‘Cheers’ set in a bar in Boston USA and the signature tune said ‘where everyone knows your name’. Being known, having friends and social connections apparently according to recent neuroscience studies, informs us that it’s not our diet or exercise that increases longevity, but the quality of our relationships and social connections.

The people we say hello to at the bus stop or the shop, that’s important to our survival, yet loneliness is epidemic.

In our fractured world we see despair, loneliness,disparity between rich and poor, young and old, haves and have-nots.

Economic powers and government systems all contribute and decide how we live. In the rich West we look down on 2nd ,3rd and now 4 th world countries with pity. They don’t have what we have, but we don’t have what they have either. Which is often a supportive social system through families, communities and work.

Our fragmentation and separation bought us loneliness, poverty and despair instead of community, support and interaction.

Even post-iron curtain states provide their elderly with support, activities and pensions, with affordable housing.

The price of democracy and capitalism is that the rich 1% get richer whilst the rest struggle often racking up debt just to survive, where a housing market is unaffordable and the young, families and the elderly suffer from economic cuts in their activities and support services.

All of the above effects our friendships, it has to!

Friends, friendship……. Friends love at all times a quote found in the Book of Proverbs in the Bible, written by King Solomon a wise but foolish King. He knew this wasn’t true but probably wished it was.

A friend who sticks close who doesn’t mind if you have no cash to buy a drink or if you move down in you’re social status or the new friend who is in your upwardly mobile new status.

Those folks who knew you when you were a kid and can’t see you’ve changed, matured and developed.

The friends who were with you through the fiery furnace but held on and didn’t let go, through the divorce, the family problems, the job redundancies, the evictions, the bankruptcy, the imprisonment, the cancer, the addictions and more……

I have had the benefit and privelige Of living and working in diverse areas, which have included the 1% of extremely wealthy and privileged. Also working and living with the ‘forgotten’, the ones who are generational unemployables.With those who were unloved, rejected and abandoned by parents and society.

Most people don’t move out of their comfort zone…to mix with people different to themselves, there is comfort in the familiar.

My thoughts today are to encourage you, the reader to ‘be a friend’ today to the lost, the lonely, the checkout assistant, the bus driver, the homeless man sitting on the floor,…….to the unlovely, you may be the friend they need today.

Finishing with the words of the great Diana Ross hit ‘ Reach out and touch somebody’s hand make this world a better place if you can’ !

You can, we can, we all can.

From one pearl to another

Mags Lewis

7/8/2019