Old classmates and school reunions¶

Tags: personal

I got a linkedin connect request from an old classmate this morning. Combined with a Tim Bray blog post this pompted me to write something about classmates from old schools. The third point is quite heavy, so please read it.

• I’m ridiculously easy to find. Just a simple google query is enough. Having a non-common first and last name helps a lot. And having your own well-filled website and a heap load of open source contributions is plainly cheating :-) So if someone from one of my old schools cares to look up my name, they’ll find me.

• One of the things I’ve been found for: a reunion of my 15-18 year old class. School “Overvoorde” in The Hague. A couple of months later I had a reunion of my 4-12 year old class (which I found out about myself). Groen van Prinsterer in De Bilt. At such a reunion you basically start afresh. No more old sore spots. You get a fresh start. I was not the class bully, more the “weak” one. But I had some 10-20 years’ of maturation behind me. And the rest (including the bullies), too. So I got a compliment about being a much more easy-going easy-talking person, for instance.

• The heavy point that was driven home to me at both reunions: forgiving one another. Perhaps too heavy a point to drive home. But I want to drive it home nonetheless. I was communicatively weak. I made errors. I bang myself on the head for some of them, still, after all those years. There were less-nice persons in those classes. Of course. Not that many, though: I’ve been really lucky. Some were not nice to me or to one of my friends. What I noticed at those two reunions that I had: you have a good time. You see old class mates and rejoice in seeing them again. Everyone (at least, that’s my conclusion) implicitly forgives each other for weird/bad/impractical/clumsy things they did. So you get a chance to grow.

Take-away: if you get an invitation for a school reunion: attend it. Whether you were a socially immature idiot or the school’s bully or the invisible mouse or the whatever: everyone will rejoice in you being there at the reunion. At least, that’s my experience of two out of two reunions.