The first was Howard and his family whom I've been able to visit on two occasions now. Howard and I befriended each other in the first year of high school and continued on to university where our friendship strengthened. With every visit in South Africa I make it a priority to visit with him and his family. I consider his two daughters as my nieces and like to bring them little gifts from Korea. Howard and I's friendship has undergone very little change during the years we have known each other and Howard's world view has stayed pretty much the same during all the time I've known him. This is not true for all my friends.
The other friend, I saw yesterday. Freddie and I became friends towards the latter part of high school when he entered my school and sat himself next to me in the computer science lab. Our shared passion for computer programming was the catalyst for our friendship, but we soon lost touch after school as he immediately went on to work in the IT-industry and I went on to study. While I was still busy with my first degree Freddie moved to Australia and has lived there ever since. He has been in Australia now for ten years, and it has been twelve years since the last time I saw him. He is in South Africa for a couple of days on account of his kid brother's wedding that occured the past Saturday. Was it not for the car accident I would not have been in this area and would not have had an opportunity to see him.
Freddie and I have changed a lot. At the time we were in school, I was a pantheistic New Ager and the two of us experimented with magic rituals. In the mean time, I've become a theist and Freddie admitted to have "come out of the closet" as a hardened atheist. In a previous recent post I told about my atheist friends and my level of comfort with them. Unfortunately I felt less comfortable with Freddie's revelation. Maybe I hoped that since we started in the same paradigm, that we would somehow grow along the same path and end up in the same new-paradigm. Instead, the two of us are now complete opposites -- him an atheist and I a theist. Yes, we still share many similar ideas, but there is little doubt that we grew apart. I guess I'm just a little sentimental about the world view that we used to share and was hoping that after all this time we would share the same world view again.
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