I ran into an old friend from high school today. To say I haven’t seen him since graduation would be a stretch, but it has been a really long time. I don’t take a ton of time to reminisce on a daily basis, and rarely think about high school, but it was nice to sit around and talk with this guy and another friend of mine from our class as well that I was having dinner with. We were talking about all the people from our small class and where everyone was today. Probably 90% of them are married. Several of them have babies. The majority of them are still living really close by. As we were talking, I realized how many people I haven’t seen in so many years. High school seemed so much more important back then.
I’ll never admit that I was one of those people that strove for popularity, but I did care a good bit about what those people thought. Now I see two of them (and they’re my two of my closest friends, so I don’t really have to impress them anymore) on a regular basis and I could go years without seeing any of the others. I guess this is why we have seasons in our life. And the more of these I go through, the less I strive for the unimportant things in life. It has been a long time since high school, and that time is only going to grow. I just pray each season brings more maturity.
As I’m thinking about focusing on the important things, I focused on Joey’s journey since high school. First off, he’s brilliant and he works super hard at everything, so that’s a pretty solid combination. By the time he graduated, he was working at a company that I’m still not sure what they do, but I know to be a “higher-up”, you need to be pretty smart. Joey locked in one of those positions, bought him a house and a few other big ticket items because he could afford them now, and he was looking pretty successful. Then, out of nowhere within the last year, Joey was hit with some news that no 20-something ever expects to hear.
Joey was told that he had a form of cancer. It was hard to focus on the specific type or the severity of it, because it’s not every day that you hear someone your age has the big C. He talked about how scary it was to face that and how he never thought that would be something he would battle so early in his life. Over the last several weeks, Joey has been given a clean bill of health and seems to be back to business as usual. He kind of downplayed it in our conversation, and I could tell it’s something he is trying to put behind him now. I couldn’t imagine the fear that comes from facing that.
When I thought back to all this changing season business, I couldn’t help but think about how Joey must have a totally different look at seasons than I do now. Even though he’s a few months younger than I am, there has to be some maturity and “growing up” that happens when you face something like that. Who knows how they would respond until they face it?
Our conversation quickly turned back to “the good ole days” and it was nice to reminisce. It was nice because those were some good memories. It was also nice because I’m no longer that person anymore. I’ve grown, matured, and just flat out changed. I wasn’t a bad kid in high school, I was just a high schooler. We’ve all got to grow up eventually, it just looks different for each of us. I left the American dream to go around the world. Joey worked his way up the ladder and then battled cancer. Our other friend got married. Three totally different journeys since high school, but we can still share the memories. Seasons make us who we are so it’s hard to forget them…
