The advice to cultivate your friendships is good advice on a variety of levels. Having good and reliable friends provides the social support that all of us need. And there is good evidence that loneliness is a serious health risk, increasing your risk of high blood pressure, depression and dementia. The advice to cultivate your friendships is also particularly relevant in today’s highly mobile society. People often relocate because of school or work, and while technology can keep us connected even when we’re halfway around the world, too often we spend our free time diverted from the quality time we should be spending with people who matter to us. There are many ways to cultivate our friendships, and they all start with spending time with our friends and communicating with them when we can’t be with them physically. As always, the golden rule applies to friendship as to every other relationship, and counsels us to do the things for our friends that we would like them to do for us, such as lending an ear, helping in times of need, and just being there to share the good times and the bad. – Christopher Simon
