A friend once ask me of this quote apparently by Abraham Lincoln.
"If friendship is your weakest point then you are the strongest person in the world".
I guess much of her confusion comes from friends being a weak trait and hence making yourself a strong person.
I guess, this quote is highly subjective to the person reading it. Depending on how much he or she progressed in his or her life. The way I see it, it is a more tragic quote than what people make it out to be.
The closest quote that probably resembles this is the quote "You're only as strong as your weakest link" but this usually denotes teamwork or team spirit. Abe's quote however is a much more personal than that.
While what "point" is, its highly debatable but assuming that it's "traits". Then weakest or lowest trait, this could mean that friendship is also lower than all your other traits including all the bad traits.The weakest of the weakest.
The more I think about it, the more I realized how true it is. Friendship is not always necessarily a good thing. Sometimes, you won't know as much about your friends as you'd like to. For all you know they are the worse kind of backstabbers or sabotagers you'll ever know. Letting a friend into you life also means inviting that "friend" into your most vulnerable parts of your life. Depending on what the friends does. He or she could potentially screw you over irrevocably; affecting the rest of your life. This begs the question, "Who are your friends?". Will you still let friends into your life knowing that they can destroy your life forever?
The most tragic thing is not when friends are no longer friends but rather the fact when friends betray friends.Not when friends have a fallout. It's human nature to protect themselves when they feel threaten but to betray another friend? Its a choice.
So how does this makes us the strongest? Think about it. Letting the RIGHT friend into your life.Letting that friend into your most vulnerable parts of your life and no one else. And letting that friend to "take care" of your vulnerabilities. When the weakest part of yourself is taken care of. Even better if the more RIGHT friends that you have. Doesn't that makes you the strongest that you'll ever be?
Probably Abe did come up with this quote, after all he is the biggest friendship activist I've ever known.
Cheers,
Kenny C.
