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Whether a friendship is a brief, but deep encounter along our path or one that lasts a lifetime, friends, by their very nature and personalities, can tell us a lot about ourselves. You could say that they reflect our own thinking back to us. They show us, just by being who they are and being in our life, exactly what we believe about ourselves and life.
Each of us is surrounded by our own “thought atmosphere”–ideas, concepts, and notions that we’ve gathered from our family, culture, and social environment. This “background” is the direct result of our conscious and unconscious thoughts and beliefs, which in turn, colors our view of the world and attracts what comes into our life and repels the rest.
Emerson wrote: “Life is the mirror of king and slave. If you want a friend, be a friend.” When we choose to send love and affection into the world our thought meet the thoughts of others who are expressing the same thing, and we are drawn together. We don’t need a yardstick to measure where we are, individually, along the pathway of Love. What we are focusing on in our thoughts about ourselves and our relationship to others and life, we are also sending out into the world. We can measure our lattitude and longitude by what and who are personal atmosphere is attracting. We can simply look around us. Our friends will tell us, just by being there, because that’s what friends are for.
