Friendship (Warning: A little bit sappy...)

Today I've been thinking a lot about friendship. What is true friendship?  How can I be a better friend?  A good, true, lifelong friend posted this as their Facebook status yesterday:

They say everlasting friends can go for long periods of time without speaking and never questioning their friendship. These types of friends pick up like they just spoke yesterday, regardless of how long it has
been or how far away they live, and they don't hold grudges. They understand 'that life is busy', but you will ALWAYS love them.

  After thinking about it quite a bit today, and reflecting on this little saying, I've really thought about friendship seriously for the first time in my life.  Friends should lift you up-even when you are as high and you think you can go.  Friends should be there to comfort you when you hit rock bottom, and everywhere in between.  Friends should be like family, and family like friends.  So what about the friends that don't meet these requirements?  The only answer is to be the friend you want to be and to love them regardless if they reciprocate. 

So now what? I'm not perfect to think things and to live them are entirely different.

There is a person in my life who is fiercely competitive. A person who claims to be my friend.  I tell myself that I will not get wrapped up in the drama, that I will not let this person's passive aggressive attempts to get me down, get to me.  But I do.  I find myself thinking about what they would think about some of the things I do.  I find myself pushing myself harder to "be better" than them.  Sadly, today is the first day I've realized this and, I find it disgusting. So, NO MORE!

Today I feel like I've come to a new place, a more peaceful place.  Regardless of what I've told myself in the past, today I feel the power of being true to yourself.  I feel excited about letting go of all that garbage and focusing on BEING a better friend, instead of wanting some of my so called "friends" to be better to me.  It's as simple as the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.