The company of friends
It is a great privilege to grow old in the company of friends – like-minded individuals who have been your companions since the time of your childhood and youth. They have lived their lives in the same environment as yourself and have more or less lived through the same life experiences that you have had.
Of course, they need not be friends who agree with you about everything. You should be able to discuss and even argue with them about subjects ranging from what Joe Biden and Narendra Modi should do when they finally retire – to why Mahinda’s hair is still jet black while Gotabaya’s hair is getting greyer and greyer – to the sartorial elegance of President Ranil and the expensive clothes worn by King Charlie Boy the Third and his beautiful queen consort.
The most important criterion is that those with whom you share the evening of your life should be friends with whom you can share a beer and a chat. They should be folk with whom you can enjoy the privilege of expressing contradictory opinions in congenial company.
Now this is a privilege that many of us in Sri Lanka take for granted. Those of our childhood friends who are now domiciled in foreign climes tell me on their visits to this Land like No Other that they envy us for being able to do this. It is all well and good living in California or Sydney or London in a six bed-roomed house with two swimming pools and three cars – but when you have to spend your evenings flicking between the twenty five channels available on your TV set because you have no old friends with whom to put a ‘kathaa’, then you begin to wonder what is REALLY important in life.
I must admit that the things we can do today – like emailing and Skyping and having a WhatsApp or Facetime conversation on your state of the art mobile phone when you are out in the open in one part of the world with someone who is walking on a street in some other far away corner of the world – are truly amazing.
Modern technology has in one sense made the world much smaller. However, I somehow feel that looking at the picture of someone on a computer screen and talking to them using a microphone and a pair of earphones is just not the same as communing with them in real life.
Many years ago I was posted to Wellawaya, and if I wanted to come home to Colombo on my off weekend I had to leave there in my car late on Friday afternoon to get home around mid-night. The drive back took about five and a half hours. Later on I worked in Hong Kong – and when I wanted to come back home for a holiday, I worked out that if I got on an AirLanka flight that left the old Kai Tak airport in the afternoon, I could be at Katunayake around mid-night Sri Lanka time. Today, I can sit at my computer in Colombo without doing any sort of travelling and carry on a three way video conversation with friends in Hong Kong, New York – and even Wellawaya (if their internet is working).
Dan Buettner in his work on Blue Zones (regions of the world where folk live longer and are more healthy than in most of the rest of the world), summarised his observations about these people as follows. People in these Blue Zones simply walked more, ate more healthily (basically plant based foods) and enjoyed each other’s company. One of the foundations of the entire Blue Zone lifestyle is “Connection.”
But in my view, all these long distance connections and communication in real time to which 21st century technology gives us access, however efficiently they function, cannot replace the pleasure of sitting in the front verandah of my house when evening falls, sharing a pot of tea (or even a glass of something a little stronger) – and putting a chat with old friends.
Sanjiva Wijesinha is the author of Tales From my Island – see https://www.amazon.com/Tales-Island-Stories-Friendship-Childhood-ebook/dp/B00R3TS1QQ/
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