Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain.” Those are the words of Muhammad Ali, the world’s iconic boxer. These days, however, Ali is Instagram-famous for his elaborate riffs explaining the society at large. Yet, even he admits to friendship being difficult to define.

Many of the definitions of friendship I have come across lately basically say one thing: a friend brings out the best in you. They say that a friend is someone who tells you when you are wrong (basically, the opposite of what I learnt at the boys’ hostel). Henry Ford agrees with this definition. As someone obsessed with efficiency would. But is friendship really an arrangement to make you a more ‘efficient’ machine?

These days, the focus is on becoming the most ‘optimised’ versions of ourselves. With our caffeine-powered busy schedules, we embody this belief. So, it’s quite natural that we should think of friends as either contributing or failing to ‘get it.’

But what about when there is no efficiency to be concerned with? What about when you’re grey and frail? I think back to the last few years of my grandfather’s life. He would get an occasional call from friends around the country. One of these friends had to go through dialysis regularly but never failed to make his weekly phone call. I can imagine it took quite some strength to do that. Yet, he never failed. Why?

There must have been something that compelled him to make the phone call; to reach out to his old, lonely friend despite the energy it took out of his limited reserve. How had their friendship survived decades of trespasses, disappointments and let downs? How come it hadn’t withered, like a lot else around my grandfather?

Perhaps, friendship is what is left behind when everything functional and transactional is stripped away. True friendship, that is.

The mark of true friendship is its ability to endure. It has no concern for status, possession or any material gain. It only cares for letting the other person know that you remain in sight and present despite their failures and shortcomings. Maybe it means to not let them feel lonely when they are brought to that unfortunate ‘place’ in life.

We all inevitably visit that place. If we may be so fortunate to escape it when we are young, age inevitably brings us all to that corner.

The essential nature of friendship remains simple. It is to be a friend for the sake of being a friend. It is celebrating the presence of a person whom you happened to run into incidentally and developed a fondness for. It is perhaps the only human relationship that is not transactional.

To be a friend then requires forgiveness and patience, above all. Some of the resentments may fade with time, others have to be willingly excused. It will require you to stay present with the changing nature of another person, with the patience usually reserved exclusively for oneself.

However, the essential nature of friendship remains simple. It is to be a friend for the sake of being a friend. It is celebrating the presence of a person whom you happened to run into incidentally and developed a fondness for. It is perhaps the only human relationship that is not transactional. That is why it ceases to be when it becomes transactional. It is elusive in its description because we cannot find a reason for it to exist. This is also why it is the most profound. It is, simply, because it is; without a reason.

Last week, I happened to read David Whyte’s Friendship. I will wrap up this column with my favourite lines from that piece:

“A friend knows our difficulties and shadows, and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die…

But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long, close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self: the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”

Uneeb Nasir writes on culture and identity in Pakistan. He can be reached at uneeb.nas@gmail.com