Thought Picnic: Choose your travel companions carefully

Sharing with the caring

Choose your travel companions carefully, they are usually rarely blood-related but the bonding that grows between you gives a daring sense of adventure that you won’t wish for another to share the experience.

The journeys you venture on in life come with perils and triumphs, you must think about who would support and succour you first in the wilderness and long before you get to the city comforts that mask the true nature of your company.

Know the wolf cries

Fairweather friends are many, feigning interest, love, and engagement, sometimes our discernment and the ability to be a judge of character deserts us and in the process, we face unexpected betrayal and hurt. To know the signs early is to be blessed beyond measure.

When you are following someone, do not follow them too close so that you cannot cut yourself loose when they are determined to end up in a ditch. You do not have to be collateral out of blind loyalty. Fall because of your misstep rather than out of using another’s eyes.

Know the person indeed

If your friends are your relations, you are probably lucky, in every case. judge a person on their own character and integrity and avoid allowing the corporate trust in an environment of allegiances like a place of worship, business, or a club to vouch for your association. Many have had their fingers burnt in being taken advantage of by malevolent people covered by community settings.

Be wary of sycophancy or bias, take the compliments and test the sincerity of anything that attempts to puff you up, between friends, honesty, frankness, openness, and bluntness does crucially matter. You need to know who would pull you out of the fire. They will always stand with you yet will not let you get away with bad behaviour. We all need accountability partners, cherish them with love, honour and respect.

Choose your travel companions wisely, that can be the difference between getting to your destination or perishing along the way.

Thought Picnic: The earnest of a let-down

Churning thoughts

It is sometimes difficult to be left to one’s thoughts as event and episode provide material to ruminate over and over again of absence and occupation.

For life does go on for those who have much doing whilst those seeking something to do are left idling about course, cause, purpose, perspective and direction.

Yet, the days coming present opportunities to show oneself again as able and capable, even so there are some ready to prepare you for an unsure future which might well be bright and rosy.

Smothered from bother

Snapping back to the thoughts you wonder again, the sympathy moves nothing forward but the fact that things are known whilst the promises made remain unfulfilled that one must stretch to do what one is barely equipped to do.

Burdened by emotions beyond oneself of urgency and tendency, the day lays waste before the dusk is done.

One must however abandon the thoughts before regret and betrayal become the seeds of self-pity and dark clouds billow of despair and discouragement bearing acid rain because of being alone in the loneliness of a stupefying lonesomeness. They must not bother for the bothersome is nowhere but here.

Thought Picnic: Et tu, Brute?

A history of betrayals

“Nothing is more damaging than to feel a sense of betrayal from those you have dared to call friends.” That is what he said to me. I could see the hurt and it was likely that the box of tissues will come in handy.

When you look at it, it is a sentence that that has been uttered through the ages by many demonstrated by a Judas Iscariot kiss, a Brutus stab, an unkind quip or an indifference to another man’s plight.

Almost like me

My friend had quite similar circumstances, throughout his working life; he had deigned to make friends and establishing relationships with the people he worked with. I have known him to care, to get involved, to appreciate and to engage.

Obviously, he was also a tough cookie, God knows there are times when certain colleagues have cursed under their breath but he has always meant well, for the good and the better all to deliver the best for whatever organisation he has worked for, testament to that is number of times he has been reunited to colleagues in other companies and projects because they felt he had something to give.

Even I have wondered how his life could almost parallel mine, it is uncanny if not scary as he fell upon some misfortune that kept him out of his line of work and expertise for a while and now he is actively ready to reengage and do what he knows best to do, he could in the same chorus as I say – deliver solutions.

Learning the hard way

His professional network have always been informed of his situation so one would hope that whenever any good opportunity comes up his name like times before will automatically come into focus.

Social media can be nice and it can also deliver very cruel news, he must have been out of sight and out of the mind of one such group of friends when he discovered that a job that would have so suited him if they had asked him went to a complete stranger.

One’s inclination will be to mount a railing accusation but to what end? Like that story of old, for the good of Rome, one would suppose the last words of Julius Caesar as the first stab went in from his good friend Marcus Brutus was “Et tu, Brute?”

Only this time, Caesar will live; nursing his wounds and life will go on. We all still need friends – ones to betray us and others to help us. Such is life.