THE GOOD NEWS:
After an ongoing cleanup effort on Mumbai’s Versova Beach, 5,000 tons of garbage have been removed, restoring the oceanfront to its natural state.
The United Nations Environment Program recently wrapped up one of its biggest clean-up endeavors. Versova Beach in Mumbai, home to 5,000 tons of garbage, was essentially being used as a dump. The waste was coming from nearby slums and had been piling up for years.
The Versova Beach clean-up initiative was started by 33-year-old lawyer Afroz Shah. Shah’s goal of making the beach pollution-free gained traction quickly. It started out with just him and one neighbor picking up garbage in their spare time. That was in the fall of 2015. Since then, thousands of volunteers have come out to help. From local school children to notable Bollywood stars, the clean-up effort was really the work of the entire city, even though it was started by one man.
The waste piles were taller than some of the children helping clear them. But in a year and a half (85 weeks to be exact), they were able to get rid of the 5,000 tons of trash that inhabited Versova. Shah’s clean-up crew also planted coconut trees along the waterfront and cleaned more than 50 nearby public restrooms. Not only will this boost morale in Mumbai, it could also help encourage tourism to the area. The goal, now that they’ve beautified the beach and surrounding area, is to maintain it. The beach now looks pristine and inviting — and though it’s gone through periods of being dirtied again, has undergone renewed clean-up efforts, inspired by Shah’s work.
As for Shah, who saw the clean-up initiative all the way through, his commitment was rewarded. In 2016, he became the first Indian to earn the United Nations’ Champion of the Earth award.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.