The Value of Friends

You ever hear that expression, worth its weight in gold? It was always a bit of a materialistic phrase for me, despite its reference to mundane & often monetarily priceless things, like a dust buster that could suck up all the dust in Africa ( which is not to say that Africa is one big dust haven, but let's be honest, it's not exactly asthma-friendly).
The meaning of it has always been to express the value that a certain thing has, beyond monetary worth, but in terms of use, positive effect & desirable results. All things in life are, more or less, labeled good or bad by these factors.
Despite the label we've placed on planet earth as, "the big bad world", there are plenty of things that we still value in it. Love, family, success, religion, spirituality, money, intimacy, sex, etc. We place value & importance upon these things because of the bliss that they bring us. We use them to make our lives a little bit better, to motivate us to work harder & to set as a goal for us to work towards.
But then, there's the issue of friends. Friends are pretty much the wild card in the card deck of human relations that one keeps. Family is constant, regardless of the level of communication. Work colleagues are irrelevant, because they are held to us by the mere virtue of employment. School mates are simple individuals who we sit with, side-by-side, during the course of receiving an education. But friends are different.
Friends are contacts that we make, willingly, despite the shallow & shady nature of certain acquaintances under the same name. Friends are people who are there for you, not out of gain or profit, but out of the spirit of friendship. Friends are people who will assist you in any way they can, any way possible, with any problem or query one might have.
But friends, like anyone else, are individuals that are capable of being alienated by those closest to them. We might feel comfortable being honest & ourselves with them, but they will always have some inverse reaction to what has been said or done to them, regardless of the motivation behind it. We can be mean, hurtful, inconsiderate, insensitive or even spiteful towards a friend, without really realizing it or acknowledging it.
Plus, like many things, we tend to take these people for granted. We tend to neglect the fact that they choose to be with us that we even tend to disregard them as individuals, but rather see them as appendages, an extension of ourselves.
It's hurtful to know that you lose value in one's life, by sheer virtue of familiarity rather than by an act that would truly result in that. It's hurtful to know that we are not seen or even thought of as having the same significance, despite everything that had been shared. It's hurtful to wonder where you fit in the scheme of things concerning people u believed were your friends.
My grandfather once taught me that only a fool would confuse an acquaintance for a friend. The difference is like that between the sun & moon, he would tell me. An acquaintance is simply a person you meet, but a friend is someone you know. Acquaintances come & go, but friends stay true, friends never leave, friends never forget or neglect.
School teachers have always infused the belief that friends, true friends, are a rare thing. They are rare because it is hard to have someone care for you because of the callous nature of the world that we inhabit, the dog-eat-dog nature of it. But a friendship is something that grows & like all growing things, it must be nurtured & protected, otherwise, it will surely die, like a great many things over the course of history.
At the end of the day, we are nothing more than the friends that we choose, for it is those friends who are a reflection of us. And the saddest thing in the world is to lose those extensions of ourselves & while I have experienced this, quite a few recently as a matter of fact, I can at least take comfort in knowing one thing, that it is their loss, not mine.