Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened!

We talk about how children need to learn how to be resilient ... well, it is that capacity to recover quickly from difficulties, that ability to spring back into shape that I lean on when the end of the school year draws close.

By the time June rolls around bitter-sweet feelings start rising in the knowledge that - yet again - our family will have to say goodbye to people who a few years ago were perfect strangers but whom, over a little timespan, have become the next best thing to family; for the shortest distance between new friends is a smile.

It is hard at the best of times watching your kids wave a tearful goodbye to their buddies but does it get easier?

Yes and no. I brace myself every year thinking this time will be easier since we've been though this exercise soooo many times. And then it hits me, usually on a beautiful sunny day. I wake up feeling blue, my heart is heavy and I know I will be spending all day fighting back those tears. It might not even be the day we bid our farewells but the sadness sits inside of me and there it will remain until the last day of school.

I don't get as emotional as I used to and I believe it is the resilience and the resistance that you acquire by seeing friends depart year after year. You learn how to handle the hurt, you manage your reactions and you focus on the good side of things.

I consider myself lucky to have made many a precious friendship over the past decades and I am grateful to have met exceptional people. For it is the ability to find meaning in friendship that makes it all worth the effort. It is the realization that no matter how far away they move, you have shared a chapter of your life with them. As Anais Nin says so nicely: "Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."