After going to school with your classmates for four or even twelve years, it’s hard to imagine ever losing touch. Once you graduate though and realize that everyone is going off to their own schools, jobs or travels it becomes heartbreakingly clear that staying close will be hard. Losing contact with your classmates is unbelievably easy to do even when by accident. It’s taken most of my friends about ten years to figure out that they left so many people behind.
The thing that’s said most about this is not to worry. Frankly, growing apart is just another one of those many facts of life that like to sneak up on us. The good news is that growing apart from one person usually happens because you’re growing closer to another. The bad news is that often brings with it feelings of guilt. In the first stages of our lives when we go from one education to the next we end up leaving behind old classmates and welcoming in new ones over and over again.
At first this may all sound quite trivial. But when you think about it you’ll see that it is a rite of passage engrained in our culture. All of our lives are built upon memories of friends and enemies that have grown out of the schoolyard and the classrooms.
There’s the yearbook no one wants to graduate without. They sit on bookshelves around the world waiting for people who want to revisit the past. It’s a favorite tool for playing the six degrees of separation with new friends.
Think of the stress so many go through when facing their high school reunions. It’s written about, joked about and portrayed on almost every sitcom aired in the last twenty years. This is a time where we want to impress our former classmates, show off if we can and forgive each other for years of absence in one another’s lives.
Then there is the vast success of websites like the classmates dot com site. This type of site thrives off of nothing but people who want to reconnect with whoever they’ve lost from school. It answers to the curiosity of ‘what happened too,’ and ‘where are they now.’ It fills a gap the nostalgia so many of us seem to carry around.
My friends have recently got in touch with old classmates as a form of business networking. They needed a job done and remembered someone from back in the day who would be perfect for the task. When people fail at such reconnection there is at least a time where conversation always leads to “a went to school with a guy who could…”
The days of this fact of life’s existence may be numbered though. Because of the growing popularity of websites that track your classmates, the mystery of their lives disappears. Then internet chat programs like Messenger actually help in making the world smaller. These days saying goodbye to parting friends only lasts until they log on that night. For most of us this is a great tool to get back together with people; but for the new generation it may actually keep the friendly classmates of the world from ever drifting apart.