It’s a brand new year, 2008. Time flies so fast doesn’t it? The years are passing rather quickly, more so approaching to my big 20. Oh gosh!!

Does it scare me? Naahh…

Does it bother me? Kinda…

Am I gonna get into a fit for it? Doubt it…

The year 2007 have taught me valuable lessons on friendship. The kind of lessons that you tend to forget just because you wanna believe that people will react in manners accordingly to your expectations. The fact is that, they don’t. And you can’t force it out of (or into) them. We shouldn’t be dictating our friends on manners they should be behaving, conforming to the kind that we want or hope for. Everybody is entitled to their own thoughts, opinions and even feelings. You can’t simply tell them, it’s wrong for you to feel a certain emotion or think a certain thought just because it doesn’t match your expectations or conform to your beliefs. As friends, they are still entitled to feel whatever emotions they wanna feel, think whatever thoughts they wanna think of and say whatever words they wanna utter. If they are entitled to it as humans, what gives friendship the right to take that away from them?

But of course, you can beg to differ. You have the right to disagree. As much as they are entitled to many things in friendship, so do you. Should you agree with what he/she says or do, voila! That makes two less unhappy people in the world. And should you disagree with what he/she says or do, then state your case. But you don’t have to do it NASTYLY. Manners my dear, where are your manners? You can still be decent about it can’t you? After all, aren’t we all friends in the first place?

Most times, I see people over-indulge themselves into ‘winning’ that they forget that winning a ‘battle’ doesn’t necessarily brings glory and triumphant. Sometimes losing a ‘battle’ might just win you the whole war. I’ve noticed (myself even) that most of the times, we are too obsessed into trying to make a point right there, right then, to the extent we do not realise that we are jeapordizing something much, much bigger that just an opinion or action.

Friends often abuse their ‘friendship’. Just because you’re friends or close to a friend (or a bunch of friends, as the case may be), that doesn’t give you the right to take them for granted. Yes, you can be more laid back but that doesn’t mean you can be blatantly rude. Respect your friends if you want to be respected in return. Respect is earned and not owed. People are forgetting that there are etiquettes in friendship. These are the basic! It’s the fundamental of what friendship is all about in the first place. If during my early early days of ‘mengaji’, it’s called ‘adab’. I know I’m not piously qualified to preach bout it but I think it would be a good reminder to myself too. There’s ‘adab’ for almost everything we do day in day out. Be it on our own or including interactions with other people. Whether your strangers or acquaintances or friends, etiquettes are there. Might vary from strangers to acquaintances to friends to best buddies, but it’s there.

When you claim you’re pretty up, close and personal being friends with your best buds, you pretty much are already at that level where ‘I am as I am, Accept Me as I am’ is a generally accepted principle(GAP). By virtue of that, you are to know each other pretty well if not very well at this stage. Hence, you should know what are the likings or the dislikes of one another, the sensitive issues, the baggages, the thrilling surprises. Having known all these at the back of your hand and pretty well engraved in the back of your mind, people are still mindful about RESPECTING that aspect of friendship. The general notion nowadays is that just because we are friends, he/she gotta accept it. Just because we are friends, that’s what I am. Just because we are friends, why wanna bother? The ‘just because’s……