Why You Should Go To Your College Reunion

1) You forge new relationships with people from your school.   You will discover that the range and kinds of relationships you can have in your life are broader now than they were when you were in college.  You will meet people you never knew then, you will be able to talk to people who intimidated you then, you will remember people you liked but lost touch with.  You will see the manifestations of so many different kinds of talent and potential, applied in all different directions.  You and your classmates are connected, even if you never met while you were in school, and there is a kind of access and discourse and even trust possible with these people that isn't quite like what you have with anyone else in your life.  These people, and the relationship you have with them, is what I was thinking about when I wrote Why Go To An Ivy League School.

2) You will forge a new relationship with yourself.  You will experience sudden memories, evoked by people and places and smells, or just the shadow of an oak on a slate walkway in a particular low slanting light, and these felt memories will be a mirror on your own past.  You will understand who you were then, and who you are now, in a fundamentally different way.  You are the same person who was here so long ago, and yet you have changed and grown and can hardly believe you were ever so young.  You will discover that you were in the Sistine Chapel and you didn't know enough to look up.  You will discover that the myth you've been telling yourself about your college experience is not nuanced or accurate, or very useful.  You will realize how much you absorbed and learned while you were here, and how much you weren't able to see and comprehend, and you will realize how different your filters have become in the intervening years.  I think you will feel relief, and gratitude, for how far you have come.

3) You will forge a new relationship with your school.  You will realize that things you blamed on it were not its fault, were not inevitable, were accidents of the filter you carried and the individual path you stumbled onto when you were too young to know better.  You will realize that things you have blamed on yourself were not your own fault, but were failures of the school or the department, oversights of preoccupied scholars who did not see you falling through the cracks.  You will realize that your school is always your school, that you have not wasted your chance to know it.  You will realize that in some way you are always welcome there, if you choose to go back. 

Comments

[PG]

Have you ever been back to Yale before now? I return to my undergrad fairly regularly (am here for the summer, in fact), so I haven't gotten the chance to get much distance on it yet.

[hubs]

that's a lot of forging. and that's a good thing!