I never happen to understand the concept of ‘moving on’, though I am hearing it quite often now-a-days. When something bad happens, we just move on with life. Then I get a doubt. Are friends bad? Because, I am hearing the usage of this phrase more often coming with friends. Ask someone if he remembers his old friends and still in contact with them their answer will be mostly no (though, not always). There are exceptions always. Some say that they remember them and were in contact with them for sometime and then lost touch. Asked the reason, the reply will be usually we ‘moved on’. We get numerous mails in our inbox everyday citing the importance of friendship etc…blah…blah… We either delete them assuming it to be one of the bulk mails we get everyday or see them thinking that this is the nth time we are seeing the mail. But are we doing anything else other than that? Are we responding to those mails? Or just simply forwarding to a big group of people in our so-called friends’ list in our mails and later forgetting about it? Just sit back and think. How many of us are now really as close to our once-upon-a-time best friends as we were then? Are we saying hi to them at least once in a month? Or perhaps even once in a year?
Let’s start the journey from childhood. We have had many best friends in our primary school. We change schools. How many of those friends are still in contact with us? Then the high school!! By the time, we come to 11th and 12th classes, if we change schools again, we get busy in our own life studying, pondering over books to get a seat into IITs(thanks to the number of coaching centers for IITs coming up now from 6th standard itself). Then enter the college, the place where we learn to live (perhaps, forget also), we make new friends. And are we still in contact with the friends we have made and we have shared everything with during our school?? Don’t say that Orkut, Facebook etc. are for such people to keep in touch with old friends. Are we really checking on everyone of our old friends even through Orkut? We are on our way to make new friends, checking out every profile we come across, send a friend request and even create fake profiles to get their acceptance. Open our own profiles and we see a huge list of more than 300+ friends and boast among others that we have so many friends. But is every one among them really a friend? If yes, from how long? And for how long? How long do you think we will be in touch with the friends we have now? We simply “move on”.
We always wait for the other person to greet us or take the initiative. There is always an excuse, “I’ve done it many times” or “How many times should I be doing it?” or “Let him do it this time. I’ll wait until then”. And you keep on waiting. That day will never come. Perhaps the other person is also thinking in a similar way. He is perhaps waiting for you to greet him. That distance in exchange of words may change slowly into the distance between the hearts, and the friendship, the bond they’ve shared over the past few years is simply gone. And if someone asks what happened between us, we just reply “He moved on with his life. I moved on with my own”. When the other person is not doing something, why are we giving someone a chance to blame or criticize us, by doing the same thing? Isn’t this happening with everyone around us? Every one of us is either suffering or the person responsible for someone else suffering somewhere on the same planet. Is this what the education from pre-KG to PG taught us? To forget people? To “move on”? Then, are friends like things which we use until we need them and throw them later when we don’t use them anymore? Think about it. We perhaps are doing that. Making friends with people, sharing our happiness and sorrows, and then leaving them and “moving on”. Friends are there to share our lives. Not just happiness, not just sorrow, not just excitement, not just misery…..but everything, throughout our lives. It is better late than never to mend mistakes. They are ready to forgive you if you are ready to forgive them. Don’t give a chance for someone to blame you for the same thing you are blaming others. So, my dear friends, LET’S MOVE ALONG and not MOVE ON.
