What about us remains the same?

Crossposted by Only4Now at Facebook:


"For a couple of months now I have participated in the social networking of Facebook. Well,' participating' is a relative word and mine has consisted primarily of up-dating my "what are you doing?" status, posting a few photo's and looking at other people's profiles. It is fascinating to watch my own reactions to seeing the names of people from high school, and I wonder if others react in a similar fashion?

First I try to stimulate the memory to place a name with a face (tough to do when women don't use their maiden name!). If I can bring up an image of that person (30 years old, by the way), then the limbic memory kicks into gear to determine if there is any emotional connection to that person. Did I like that person? Were we friends? Did they like me? Were we nice to each other, mean, or indifferent? And finally, what might we have or have had in common that might warrant a connection in this stage of our lives. I guess, like most things, I take the whole thing too seriously.

What is really intriguing about this process, is that most of what I see on the profiles of my former friends, neighbors, and accidental cohorts, regards how they have changed since last we met. The marriages, the kids, the careers...all the stuff that I myself focused on in creating my profile. Certainly we highlight what defines us as we are now, and not how we were at 17. But that leaves much to the imagination about what in each one of us remains the same. Those things that made us nice to some and not so nice to others, do those things change as we get older?

It is an interesting experiment in which we are participating. It means different things to different people. I think for those of us who left our home towns shortly after graduating high school, it's a different kind of significance to hear from and reconnect to those you've neither seen nor heard from for 30 years. It definitely makes me a little homesick (yes, after 28 years living in three different states, and looking to move on once again, I still consider New York home, and I still get homesick). It also makes me sorry I didn't stay in better touch and get to know the people I shared so much time with, as they got to know and figure out themselves. It's nice to have that opportunity to do that now, and to perhaps discover, what in them remains the same."

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