Dec 16, 2002
Missing the Reunion
A little over 7,700km away from where I sit writing this, a hundred people are gathering under tall trees for my college ten year reunion. I am not there.
It’s weird. Ten years ago (well, twelve if we include the years at PC) each of us at college reserved a little chunk of mind space for wondering what we’d be doing by the time the ten year reunion swung around – we knew about it even when we were attending, and we relished the thought of such a distant, exotic future point.
The Ten Year Reunion. It morphed into this gigantic, intangible thing that loomed distantly, shadowing our eventual departure from the college, and colouring our future plans. “By the ten year reunion, I hope to be… In ten years, I will… In a decade, I’m going to have…” It became a future marker, something to define ourselves and our activities by, something by which, by when we somehow needed to prove ourselves.
In the first while after college, as we embarked onto bigger adventures than we can possibly have anticipated at college, ten years seemed a long way away. 2002 was in a completely different century. We looked over our shoulders (Wistful? Relieved?) at the college experience, fading into the distance, and tried to live in the complicated now, wherever it found us – university, travelling, home, work.
Years passed and the reunion got closer, as the college experience got steadily further away. It became hard to believe that the looming distant reunion of the future was somehow closer now than the actual reality of us, there and young, idealistic, naive and complicated under the tall trees.
The reunion was creeping up. A few years ago when the year 2000 ticked over – that significant date which had loomed in our futures since childhood – I experienced a jolt of excitement and quasi-panic at the realisation that our own ten year reunion was actually just around the corner, chronologically speaking, and that there were only a couple of years left to achieve all those things we vowed we were going to, only a handful of months left to prove…. what?
Though it had no doubt happened before, it was at that point that some of us may have have realised that there is actually nothing left to prove – at least not to our college contemporaries, peers or faculty. We may have wanted to return to the college triumphant – educated, employed and settled, with beautiful child or partner (or both) in tow (Healthy, happy and succesful: isn’t that the dream?) but we probably knew, by summer 2000, that time had pretty much run out to do anything extraordinary, except continue to exist.
I wanted to go to this reunion, though I have had mixed feeling about it for a few months now. Despite misgivings, I had every intention of attending. But one thing and another has got in the way, and conspired to mean that I won’t be attending after all. So today, as strangers who were once friends gather under tall trees in western Canada to get re-acquainted and coo over wedding/baby pictures, new haircuts and highflying lifestyles, I’m here in London, trapped by work and health and ambivelance and lack of oomph, all of which make it difficult to travel at the moment for various reasons.
But I’ll be thinking of them under the tall trees: older, but still just as complicated.
For a decade, this reunion has been an identifiable milestone for those who graduated with me back then. But every day is a milestone. We have nothing to prove to each other now, except that we made it this far. When we left our little hothouse of education, emotion and experience, we thought we deserved a pat on the back for getting through two years of college, but the real congratulations and celebrations are for making it through the last ten, which must have been much more complicated, difficult, passionate, challenging and exciting than we could have ever hoped or feared.
In many ways, I’m sad to be missing the reunion, because it was a definite marker, something anticipated for such a long time. But in another way, philosophically (and the particular irony of that choice of word will not be lost on anyone who had to suffer my inane ramblings in Philosophy lectures back then) I’m sort of secretly glad I won’t be there, because sometimes it’s good to let things pass, especially those things we thought we would need to measure ourselves against; the events we turned into vast towering milestones.
In realising and recognising that these markers are not as enormous as we once believed, we turn them from stumbling blocks to stepping stones, on our way to the wider future.
