I had lunch today with a friend from high school. Actually, the last time I saw Nikki was in a chance encounter at the mall circa 1995, but obviously I didn't have frequent contact with her from the time I graduated in 1991.
In any case, at some point I decided that I wasn't really interested in keeping in touch with people from high school from the standpoint that, while we share common experiences from high school hell, over time we're not the same people anyway. Then Facebook came along and you almost can't avoid running into people, even if it's only virtually. We exchanged the thumbnail version of our life stories, and having both been through divorce and career changes, I felt like we had more to talk about than I expected. So we had lunch today.
I'm glad we met up. Certainly the theme we both share is that if your life isn't what you want, change it. We both spent time in dysfunctional relationships and left the relative security of jobs to do new things. We both had post-divorce dating stories that didn't work out. We're both frustrated by friends who bring on their own suffering from suboptimal relationships and jobs they hate.
That you can find people who share these kinds of things with you isn't in and of itself a big deal. Obviously many of the people close to me fall in those categories. I was just surprised to find that someone I went to high school with got it too! We traded stories that we'd heard about former classmates, and how so few of them ended up as you'd expect. The big basketball star of my class gave up his free ride and dropped out of school to be a loser deadbeat dad. Two of the "pretty-popular" girls I ended up going to school with, and they were actually very cool, not stuck up bitches as you might perceive in high school. Some just never changed at all, never challenging themselves to do anything. Others went right into the get married, make babies, enter the grind mode.
I know I'm frequently accused of thinking that following a non-conformist path in life is what makes you a better person, but it's not that at all. I think what rounds you out and feeds your soul is the action you take to explore your universe, fail, succeed and regularly re-evaluate your state frequently. Sometimes, you may end up with a Stepford life, and that's fine. But the journey seems infinitely more interesting when you really consider everything.
I've started to be like that, with certain aspects of my life, really just in the last five years. Divorce has a way of shaking you out of complacency, that's for sure. It sounds like Nikki has gone through the same thing, and has reached a point in her life where she's driving toward something, but not in a way that consumes her. Her relationship and career status is good for the moment, and she somehow combines that with ambition and drive in the right places. It occurs to me that's what I want out of life... to be growing, but not at the expense of enjoying today.
It was a lot of fun catching up. It sure is amazing, all that can happen in a person's life over the years.
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