Life Lessons from a College Reunion
“New friends may be poems but old friends are alphabets. Do not forget alphabets, because you will need them to read the poems” — attributed to William Shakespeare
I have had the good fortune of attending a three-day reunion with people I studied Under Grad with. This is the cohort with whom I spent half of my teenage years. In many ways, in these four years, we grow from girls/boys to women/men. Meeting them after twenty-five years, I got a peep into how life has taken us through ups and downs and how we dealt with them and grew our personalities and most interestingly how our expectations of life changed from late-teens to mid-forties.
In addition to rekindling old relationships and transporting ourselves back twenty years back, this reunion provided me an excellent opportunity to reflect on life (mine and my college mates).
As a lead up to the event, an “Year Book” was created — which contained, for each college mate, the then-and-now pictures, any skill/interest one picked up after college, what one is up to professionally and personally, one’s expectations of the next twenty-five years and who among our batch defied expectations. This year book is for keeps. The emotional content it holds is invaluable. Equally, it provided me a well-rounded basis for my reflection.
This group is not truly a random sample of population as it represented one specific college (IIT Bombay) in the country — nevertheless, data from well over 300 folks does make it a random sample within the category. Any possibility of lessons to be learnt from this many real-world experiences should not be wasted and in that spirit, here are some of my fungible reflections:
- Baldness among men is probably a universal law: So many (including yours truly) turned up with bald heads that I was reminded of a certain Baba Sehgal song from the 1990s — rather fittingly.
- People generally end up doing well in life: Pretty much everyone progressed well in life — both professionally and personally
- Freedom and adventure are core human tendencies: Running, hiking, trekking, golf, tennis seem to be the things that people (the ones who do pick up anything) pick up as they age. My familiarity with golf and tennis is very limited but I can confidently say all the other three activities require endurance, a spirit for exploration and adventure and craving for freedom. Partly, reasons for picking these activities may have to with mid-life crisis (political correctness — checked) but I think there is lot more to this — by this stage in life, most of us have become confident enough to assert our core true selves after having found ways to deal with societal expectations and obligations. Aren’t freedom, adventure and exploration essential aspects of our true nature?
- People change but they don’t really: We changed a lot in twenty-five years with various experiences in life but at the same time, most of us did not change much at all. As in, the core traits of the person hardly changed. What may seem like transformation of a person may just be the core nature manifesting itself. This makes me think the earlier we know ourselves, the better chances of us realizing our true potential and the better, our lives may turn out. On the flip side, the longer we try to live to others’ expectations of us, the longer we may end up with subdued
- Most desired vocation in life can be found at the intersection of passion and aptitude: We had this question in our year book where we were asked to identify a college-mate who defied our expectations. It was interesting to see the answers to this question. Hopefully I will not be faulted to draw a conclusion that we seemed to appreciate those who ended up following their heart and made something of it
- Life is too short and goes by too fast: There is really no point in pushing out important milestones in life. We are aging fast and this reunion made me realize the importance of keeping in touch and celebrate each-others’ life’s milestones
- People are people and friends will be friends: We left college with a lot to prove to the world, to ourselves and to each other. Apart from friendship, our education system and society did leave us as competitors too. But after twenty-fives, notwithstanding the levels of individual professional achievement, I could not sense any competition among us. All I sensed was gratitude, care and a spirit of contribution
- It is never too late to seek help: A bunch of us made a promise among ourselves that we will reach out to one another when we need help. Until now, most of us have fought our battles with little intervention from our collegemates. Many of us do appreciate the value of professional networks. But the network with your collegemates can go way beyond professional network. It can be professional and emotional network. Also, no matter how experienced, rich, successful one is, everyone goes through dark times occasionally and it will be good to have a strong network of friends who can help you get through them
“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
For the younger ones out there, you need not wait for twenty-five years to get back in touch with your friends. Move forward in life, you will anyway but strong emotional network could help you do that lot more assuredly and perhaps even help you go (much) farther. This applies to older ones out there too.
