40? | kdhs76

Forty Years On - Why a Reunion?

Thomas Wolfe wrote that "you can't go home again."

We, especially those who left South Africa so long ago and visit only occasionally, understand this all too well. We're a confused bunch - treated as somewhat foreign where we now live and feeling somewhat foreign where we once lived. We know the roads but we no longer know the landmarks. We see the way things are but we don't know what it means.

Then we get together with people we haven't seen in decades. We might not recognize faces, but we remember the most subtle facial expressions. We haven't heard from them in years but we know their voices instantly, even if we can't name them. You could say we don’t know one another anymore.

But we saw one another stumble through childhood, grope our way through adolescence, and pretend that we'd reached adulthood. There are things we know about one another that our parents, spouses and kids don't.

Since then, we've had successes, failures, high points, low points, joy and sadness, gains and losses. We now have what we didn't back then - experience.

What has that done to us and for us?

Mostly, we're a lot nicer than we used to be. We're empathetic because we've all been cut down to size by life's lessons. We're not so quick to decide who is successful and who is not, mostly because we're not completely sure what "success" even means. If we do, we know that it's an internal thing more than an external thing. We don't judge who is smart (clever) and who isn't, because we've learned that it depends on the context as much as the person. We know a lot more than we used to but mostly we know that we've got a lot more to learn. So after all these years on separate paths, we reconvene to try and learn from everyone else's journey.

We're a lot more real and a lot more realistic. We don't need to pretend anymore. We need the energy for things that matter, and we don't care about trying to impress anyone - we are who we are. That doesn't mean we're not dreaming, we're just doing it with our eyes wide open.

Home isn't about a place. Wherever we are - Johannesburg, Sydney, Denver or Facebook - getting together with people with whom we have deep roots may be the closest thing we have to home. The hell with Thomas Wolfe. Let's get together, let’s reconnect, let’s rekindle old friendships and create new ones - and we can go home anytime we want.