People come in different flavors: smart, greedy, careless, benign, pretentious, incomprehensible, selfish, influential, compassionate, cold, amiable, iffy, flaky, fair, snappy, reasonable, boring, trustworthy. They come and go in waves and in different wavelengths. Though, there seem to be a very tiny set of individuals who leave you in a moral maze, forcing you to enrich your talent for survival, and teach you to cut and run from cut-and-run.

Trust as the main ingredient of friendship, evolves! By definition, trust is an act of reliance that establishes predictability in our interactions. Unfortunately, trust and its associated credit is highly fragile. There is this accepted notion that: it only takes one moment of doubtful encounter to fracture a trustworthy relationship, which is usually something that’s taken years to establish … “Oh yeah, absolutely correct!” people respond to that notion. People even don’t blink to agree with such idea as if it’s a tenet. Well, it is not, it’s only a human behavior that’s become a mediocre norm. The rush to discredit is rooted in our insecurity and is more or less, a protective mechanism.

One of the most common patterns of breaking trust is when people get into heated arguments. We always lose things when there is fire. But, there are those teeny-tiny set of individuals who teach you lessons by being on the abnormal side of the norm. My late friend Hamid was one of them. He left us four years ago. There are many attributes and traits of his that could describe him, but certainly, the most intriguing and unique characteristic of his, was the fact that he was forgiving. So much so that, he never expected to predict his friends behaviors, but he trusted them anyway. He always put all the weight on himself, and never expected much from others. He was sincere, but perhaps, too sincere for his own good. His transition to the better place was our fire, and his presence was what we lost in that fire.

Hamid is now smiling. When someone smiles, it’s a disconcerting cause for celebration …

Cheers,