About Your Friends

There is a Spanish proverb that says "dime con quien andas y te dire quien eres." It means that if you tell me about your friends, I'll tell you about yourself.

It’s natural to want to have friends, but we shouldn’t try to be friends with everybody.

When I was a child I wanted everyone to like me, so I tried hard to make friends with all of the other children. If one child liked strawberry ice cream, I told him that I liked strawberry too. If another child liked basketball, I would say that I liked basketball too. This didn’t work out well because no matter how hard I tried there were kids who didn’t like me. There were even some who treated me unkindly.

For instance, one day when I was 9 years old I was playing soccer with other children at school. We were practicing throwing the ball in from the sideline. It was my turn to throw the ball in, but one of the other boys wanted to take my turn and he demanded that I give him the ball. When I refused, he punched me in the mouth. I dropped the ball and fell down. My mouth hurt a lot and I started to get a headache. Too dizzy to stand, I just stayed there for a while crying because I was embarrassed. Finally, I sat up and discovered that the boy who had punched me had run away. None of the other children came to help me.

After that day I thought a lot about what had happened. I didn’t understand why the boy had punched me because I hadn’t mistreated him. I was just taking my turn. Finally, after a long time, I realized that I was not the source of the problem. The boy who punched me had been completely wrong. I came to understand that although it is important to treat other courteously, there are two reasons why it is not possible or desirable to be friends with everybody.

First, no matter what we do, we will meet people who simply don’t like us. We should not pretend to be like others because when we pretend to like the things that others like, we lose ourselves. A true friend will like and respect us just the way we are.

Second, there are people in this world who are bad. We should be courteous to bad people, but we should not try to make friends with them because they do bad things and, in order to be friends with them, we too must also do bad things. So, in the end we will become bad.

The best policy is to make friends with people who don’t criticize us for our differences, instead they like and respect us for them. Most importantly, when choosing your friends you should remember the Spanish proverb… "dime con quien andas y te dire quien eres." OSU!