You never know when something might happen that will threaten to alter the way that you perceive your existing reality. Sometimes it’s a big thing that happens like a career change or a job loss; a marriage or a divorce that will serve to re-inform and then reshape the certainty of your own private universe. Perhaps a significant introduction or maybe a serious illness will force you to have to reshuffle your deck and deliberately contemplate what you have been accepting as part of the absolute way that life “just is.”
Sometimes, however, it’s a little thing that happens; a discreet, unassuming, yet intrusive little nudge, that beckons quietly and—
in the middle of the night...
I was sitting at my desk, mindlessly surfing the Internet in an attempt to unwind and relax when, with a single point and a double click, I found myself right back in the twelfth grade. I had Googled my way to yesterday via my high school class reunion website. Like magic and without warning I was seventeen years old again. Transported back to a time and a place I had intended to forget; that I thought I had left behind forever, I was grateful for the opportunity to simply remember.
It took me more than a few minutes to recover from the sobering realization that, in my desperate haste to grow up and “get the show on the road,” I let high school pass me by. So anxious to dismiss everything that was familiar to me in exchange for my chance to conquer the world, I plowed through my classes and my mid-terms and the parties and the proms, and all of that delicious adolescent heartbreak, as if somehow, the future would get impatient and maliciously leave me stranded in my teens.
Once recovered, I settled in for a trip down memory lane.
I surveyed every inch of that website. Picture after picture, I struggled to put the names to the faces. Page after page the memories slowly returned and I tried to reconstruct that part of my life, as if in successfully doing so, I might be granted a chance to do it all over again.
Imagine.
After having tripped sufficiently, tired, I decided to conclude my journey. As I mentally prepared to make my reentry back to the future so I could go to bed, I decided to visit one more page. I hesitated and then I cautiously clicked:
“In Memory of”
I was tentative because I was reluctant to learn which were the ones who were no longer with us, and why.
I read each and every word of every single entry in an attempt to privately honor the lives that my classmates had lived. The more I read, the more I wondered about them and who they really were; about the stuff that wasn’t written down. Had life lived up to their expectations? What would they have done differently if they could do it all again? I thought about the words that had been left unspoken; about the dreams that would remain unfulfilled. Time waits for no one. Time doesn’t need our consent to march on and it doesn’t require our attention to leave its unavoidable mark on our lives. That’s not something that they teach you in high school.
You never know when something might happen that will threaten to alter the way that you perceive your existing reality.
I didn’t expect when I woke up that morning that by the time I went to bed that night, my private little universe would be altered because I was able, for a moment anyway, to take a trip back to school. That high school class reunion website rocked my world because it provided me with a profound and meaningful opportunity to examine my life in a different way. It humbled my heart and renewed my commitment to live my life to the fullest.
