I understand why so many are apprehensive about the idea of a high school reunion.
It is always fraught with mixed emotions – full of surprises, expectations, and even foreboding. But it is a trip that is necessary – for one reason or another. Whether it is a trip eagerly anticipated, or dreaded, you find yourself preparing for that trip. And I discover as one gets older (at least on my part), the more emotional the preparation and the trip becomes – a sentimental sort of journey embarked with the most hopeful of wishes, and the direst of apprehensions.
One is filled with tensions both terrible, and yet enthralling. While one is no longer the insecure, awkward youth that first stepped into the portals of your beloved school, you are beset by a whole new set of adult struggles. You know that you are no longer that person that left. In the passage of time, and in the breaking and mending of hearts, souls and body has left marks that can sometimes make it difficult to recognize our old selves.
It is a poignant, bittersweet embarkation – for it is a glad reunion but also a time for grieving for the things we have lost along the way.
And what of the classmates who saw you before all of it changed? Fellow pilgrims toward the path of adulthood, we were all incomplete and still searching for an identity. And in this sometimes-difficult pilgrimage, we have been unintentionally cruel, as Ms. Bunagan once said reprimanding us of our childishness. You remember all the good times shared, the excruciating, the embarrassing, the fun. Old wounds are revisited with the glad discovery that it is healed, leaving only a faint scar.
Then of course, came the day of the reunion.
What words can describe the waves of exhilaration and sweet notes of happiness that came in tides that crest and surge? It is both tender and triumphant. It is laughter with tears shed in joy and sometimes in sorrow. It is redemption, and cleansing. It is confronting that which you feared most but only to realize it no longer holds any terror. It is coming into terms with the mistakes you have made, but also letting go of the wrong committed to you. It is a cold, tall drink that brings relief to a parched soul. It is exorcising ghosts of the past but also embracing a great future so bright, as one 80’s song would put it, “you gotta wear shades.”
The ancients resort to rituals in an attempt to recapture a sacred moment – a space and time where one is able to experience that which is transcendent and ideal. Rituals - especially rites of passage mark the time of growth and development. It is a time of renewal and transformation. It is about the future. Rituals however hold another important dimension: a look back into the past.It is a nod of respect to what has happened. Without the past, one cannot be what you are now, or what you will be.
I don’t want to turn all geeky (but we all were and are – right?!), but like characters from the Greek mythology, we go through metamorphosis. It is the shedding of the old self so that we are not overly burdened by the cares of the past. But it also to recognize what our past has contributed to make us what we are now. It might be painful, it might be traumatic, or for some, sublime and quite enjoyable, but it must be named, and by naming it we are empowered to face a greater future.
High school reunions has taken on this ritual aspect, and for that we are grateful.
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