Lessons From The Little Prince

“Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions.” Little Prince” Author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on Losing a Friend

     The Little Prince — "a book very much about reconciling the great unbidden gift of loving a friend with the inevitability of losing that friend."

     We enter into friendships more easily when we are young and have fewer options and distractions. With the passage of time we gain more freedoms and thus more opportunities to forsake the friendships created in youth. It's an absolute inevitability of life--that we will all lose a friend to death, argument, or distance. 

     It we knew when we were younger how hard this would be and how devastated it would leave us, would we still take the chance? We are by nature a trusting bunch so I would answer in the affirmative. I would also add that I try to keep adding friends as I age and try to acquire them via proximity as we did as children. It's not the distance is an automatic disqualifier but it does make it difficult to sustain friendships, no matter how advanced how technology becomes. If you can feel the touch of their hand or the smell of their skin then you bond on levels impossible to replicate and which take you back to your first tries at friendship, that either ended well or badly.