“Class Reunion: Part Two”
Well, it’s good to be home. Especially since I just learned that the Great Lakes area, which I visited last week, received a very early snowfall — just four days after I left!
Before I go on to talk about the reunion I attended, an announcement: I will be presenting a class or two in Asheville next month. I have yet to decide on the main focus, but the top contender at this time is Relationships. Check back here next week for more information.
Okay, now for the disappointing news — my 40th class reunion was a bust! Out of 600 classmates, only 70 attended. 70! And I didn’t even know the majority of them. Only two female friends were there, which was something; not one male. In thinking this over since then, I’ve decided that the best explanation is that a lot of folks attended either the 25th or 35th reunion, found it dull, and vowed to never return — as I did last Saturday night. The question remains — why did I want to go to this thing anyway?
After the fact, the answer was different than what I had thought. Well, sort of different. It’s still true that I was curious to see where life had led so many of the people I had known, and I wanted to apologize to a few of them, whether or not they knew what the heck I was talking about. But I also had to admit that I wanted to be seen. And admired, perhaps.
I noticed that in general the women looked much better — healthier, younger, more well-preserved — than the men in attendance. There is still a part of me that can’t seem to get past that superficial need for the kind of attention that being attractive brings with it. I guess it was unrealistic of me to think I had left that behind entirely, when so much of my earlier life seemed to depend on it for defining who I was.
This seems to be tied in to the false spiritual understanding that as you evolve spiritually in your life, you get to a point where appearances mean nothing. Perhaps that will happen some day — I’m not there yet. And that’s OK. I’m learning that it’s just as easy to beat yourself up over spiritual success (or lack of it) as any other kind. I see this all the time in healers around me, and I’m no exception.
Another revelation was that my desire to see and talk to my high school friends was for the most part sentimental. And therefore it may have been for the best that I didn’t see them. The truth about these friends is that they fell away long ago, largely because I let them do so. Not having a clue as to who I really was back then, I tried to fit in, and found a group of simpatico girls –my “group.” Around the time of our junior year in college, things started to feel uncomfortable to me — largely due to the fact that I was going in a different direction both socially and politically than these people.
They were on one side of the Vietnam war debate; I was on the other. They were on career tracks; I was on the hippie track. Although we stayed in touch for the next few years and I even roomed with one of them, it became more and more painfully clear that we had very little in common. We drifted apart and I never looked back. Well maybe a little. Again, for sentimental reasons.
You really can’t go home again, and that’s the truth. Too often we let what we think “ought to be” guide us. That never works in the long run. Childhood and adolescence are a time of seismic change, and we will never feel again the way we did then. Some wish they could go back — there is no back — it no longer exists. I don’t want to go back — perhaps I had hoped to glean a little more understanding of those tumultuous years, when Diane was such an unknown element. Fortunately I don’t have a “need” to do that. Right now feels better and better to me.