This past June marked 35 years since I graduated from high school ( as I joke of course I was only 9 years old when I finished high school ). Thanks to social media, I am able to stay in touch even if only virtually and electronically with a number of former classmates. We get to share the odd greeting, conversation and of course extend birthday wishes when Facebook reminds us that our friend's birthday is today. There is always about high school reunions held at various significant number of years after graduation, ten, twenty or twenty-five. Many movies have been produced with high school reunions as the theme where old friends get together after so many years of not being in touch and of course it's like the friendship never ended... or in some of these movies it's about all the high school drama, conflicts, and insecurities coming back.
So why am I writing about high school friendships and reunions this morning ? Well as I started out saying, this year marks 35 years since I finished high school. Being a nice round number, there was discussion about planning out some sort reunion. With classmates scattered all over North America and beyond, our busy schedules and perhaps, some who simply have no interest in thinking back to our high school years, arranging to get everyone or even a majority of people back together is a huge challenge. Over the years, there have been a few attempts to hold reunions and there have been small groups of classmates who have gotten together and on two occasions, the year of our 20th year since graduation and when our former high school celebrated 50 years of existence, we have had what can be considered a fairly significant reunion. In trying to organize something for this year, various dates were proposed and finally this past Saturday evening, a small group of us got together for dinner. So now, that tells you why I am posting about high school friendships today. At the core of everything, begs the questions, "Why does a 5 year period that occurred during one's teenage years manage to hold significance and importance to so many people ?". Well if I may share some of my insight...... High school can be both a tumultuous and amazing time in one’s life. No matter if it is one or the other or a mix of both, no one can deny that the friendships you make can significantly contribute to that. Of course you can make amazing friends long after you graduate, but the friends you make in high school are unique in that together you grow more into your unique personalities that can shape who you become as adults. Often times, the life lessons we learned and the experiences we endured whether positive or negative during high school remain the reference point for how we might deal with things are we progress through life. The friendships that we shared when going through those life lessons and experiences can have a huge influence on us. That is why that even as the years go on, high school friends are often the friends you’ll share the strongest bond with. You might lose contact with high school friends as the years pass but often times, when you do get the chance to reconnect, that those bonds remain and most interestingly with some of the former classmates that you might not have been close suddenly you realize that you share affinities with that you could never have imagined back in high school. I would wager that anyone who has attended a high reunion has said or heard the words " who knew how much we had in common, if only we have gotten to know each other back then". Whether in the work place, on a sports teams and yes even in high school, we often hear the word "clique" . You know the word used with a certain negativity to describe why certain people hang out together all the while excluding others. Now I can't even begin to imagine what day to day life might be for high school students today but I do now that the notion of cliques has survived the test of time. Every generation of high students has faced the reality of cliques forming in high school. As I have often said to members of teams I coached, "why does everyone thing of cliques as a bad thing?" . Think about it, have you ever looked up the definition of a clique? Google it, and you will come up with something ( or some slight variation ) that reads as follows ; "a small group of people, with shared interests or other features in common, who spend time together and do not readily allow others to join them." Now, the notion of " do not readily allow others to join them " does conjure up the idea of exclusion but isn't that normal in a sense. People with shared interests will tend to gravitate to each other and those who don't share those same interests won't, or will eventually drift away to seek others with whom they share an affinity. If I look back to my high school years, we had cliques or some form of sub-groups within our high school population. The obvious ones were by grade, or seniors vs juniors. How often did we experience having a sibling with whom we might be close but somehow, once in the hallways of high school, the simple fact that they were in a different grade somehow made it taboo to acknowledge their existence. Of course this was more often than not the older sibling ignoring the younger one(s) while the younger ones wanted to show their peers how they had " the in" with the older students. Then of course, there were always and will always be the sub-groups within the same grade years, the cool kids, the nerds, the brains, the jocks, the stoners, the social elite , the outcasts or the loners. Some embraced the group they might be part of and some did everything they could not to be associated with a certain group and get themselves into one they wanted to identify with. There are two ironies about this whole high school clique thing. The first one being that even within a specific group, they were variations, you know, athletic but not jock enough to be a jock, smart but not smart enough to be a brain, cool but not quite cool enough to be among the social elite. If I am honest that is how I saw myself. I had qualities that allowed me to fit in with different groups but not quite enough of any one them to really fit in. What's funny is that worry that I had as a teenager ( and I am sure many others did also) is actually a benefit as a an adult, the ability to adapt to the environment and fit in with a wide range of people. The second irony is that ask peers how they perceived each other and the opinions of the same individual with differ depending on which of the clique the person being asked belongs to. Ask these same questions of each other 35 years after graduation and opinions change. Again, using myself as example, I consider myself smart, I was an honor student but on the lower end of the scale. Ask those above me how they might remember me and they might say I was someone always involved in sports. As the jocks and they might say I was athletic but was part of the brains. Again, many of things we applied important to as teenagers in high school will probably seem irrelevant today as we are middle aged people but all of them put together played a huge role in our development. So are high school friendships important ? And if they are, why are they important ? No one knows those early morning, straight out of bed looks more than your close friends. They’ve seen you come to school on those Mondays when you are already ready for the day to be over, but they’ve also seen you at your best for all of those nights out and school events. The five years of high school are a significant time period in anyone’s life, full of change and new experiences. This is where many of us develop our personalities and discover new interests. The friends one makes within those years can influence this and help shape the person you are today. The experiences we had with our friends also contributes to our betterment as people. Even with the bad decisions that we made, our friends from high school were right by our side to make those choices with us and share in the experience. We made them together, learned from them together, and then hopefully can look back to laugh on them together. Towards the end of high school, a great amount of change is brought on. As we moved onto cegep, university and into the next stages of life, it was easy to lose touch and for those friendships to be left in the past. You might not know when you’ll see your old group again, but I like to think that when we get to reconnect again, we will only remember our high school years positively. What happens after high school is that life can get incredibly better if you chose to make it so. You'll be a lot freer to make the choices that matter to you, to discover, and to meet the people that feel right to you. For me, after high school and cegep, I lost touch with most of my high school friends. It wasn't be conscious choice or because I wanted to seek out new friendships, it was simply the path that life led me on. It started when soon after graduation, I left for the majority of the summer and lost touch with many of my friends. As friends took different paths for cegep, the group got smaller and some of the common interests we used to share were no longer common. I took some time off of school and worked, I started university a little later than most of my high school classmates, worked, was involved in activities where most of my friends were not, met my future wife and life started. I simply lost touch with them and made new friends. As time passed, reconnecting got harder and everyone simply went on about their lives. I would occasionally ran into a former high school friend who might tell me about other friends they remained in touch with, or a wedding or party they might have attended where many of our friends were also there. The years passed and the new friends became the norm and the high school years became a collection of nice memories. As I mentioned, we had the chance to share to reunions and like I imagine often happens, people reconnect , reminisce and pledge to stay in touch ( and let’s be honest that is so much easier today with technology. It usually lasts a while but then like many things our day to day lives take hold and we return to our usual routine. We may once again lose touch but rekindle the ideas of getting together as the talk of reunions starts again. However, when I have ran into former high school classmates ( I won't say friends because to be honest, it goes beyond friends), for me, all the years go away and there is a connection that remains regardless of the level of commonality of friendship we might have shared in high school. We have all gone through our share of embarrassing, yet hilarious situations in high school, whether that was getting drunk before a school dance and having to sleep it off in the car ( of course this is fiction lol ) or forgetting gym clothes and having to wear the disgusting extra-large t-shirt from the teacher’s office. Regardless of what they were, they might have made us want to crawl into a hole and never come out when it happened. Yet, somehow, we survived through it. How? Because friends stood by you through it all. No matter how many stupid mistakes you continued to make, they were there. Sure, they might have laughed from time to time or even endlessly teased you about it, but if somebody else outside of your the clique messed with you, more often than not, someone had your back. Don’t even get me started on awkward phases the pretty much every teenage goes through: growth spurts, acne, changing voice, the start of facial hair that looks pretty bad on everyone except the select few that can make it work for them. Trying to follow fashion trends while maybe having to wear what was practical. Thank God we didn't have Facebook, Instagram, twitter or any other demonic app that might capture our awkward moments and have them shared online for everyone to see instantly. However through it all, most of us had those people who saw us at your worst and most humiliating moments, yet still stood by us. New friends are great, but they didn't know us during our "glory high school days", like maybe having to put on a plastic garbage bad and 3 layers of close and run laps around the mezzanine over the gym trying to lose 5 pounds before the wrestling weigh in, or a teacher who decided a group of you were great at making comments from the back of the class and named you the Peanut Gallery . Now that is funny, a badge of honor right? Sure, until the 5 others decide you're pigpen and the name sticks on the yearbook graduation blurb. Why couldn't I be Snoopy, that dog is cool ! Or maybe it is trying to take center stage during a high school dance but falling flat on your ass. Those memories, although extremely embarrassing, adds character to who we become as adults. Having people to remind you of your silliness and uniqueness is great because it brings you back to a simpler time when most of life was all ahead of you and everything was possible. High school differs any other social interaction other then perhaps marriage in the sense that in high school, you saw the same people for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week Even if you weren't friends, or shared the same classes. there was no way to avoid anyone, especially if you went to a small school. Your group of friends essentially became the only people that you could tolerate at your school, so you spent practically every waking moment with them. You ate together, gossiped together, laughed together, cried together, and skipped class together (shah, don’t act like you haven’t done that before). Every day, it seemed like new inside jokes are created, new memories were made, and you all just sat around wondering why you don't have your own sitcom TV show. Let’s admit it, everyone went a little crazy at some point during their high school career. Of course, there was all the drama concerning crushes. It's likely that everyone has liked at least one other person in their friend group at some point, meaning it either created funny stories to share, or a weird, awkward tension between everyone. Either way, it's safe to say high school was a roller coaster that continued to throw huge curve-balls at everyone. Of course, there were moments when you just couldn't stand some of your friends, but those moments were true tests of friendship. If you got past them, they made you realize just how meaningful and awesome it was that you had found each other. There were some friendships that definitely withered as a result of these arguments and drama and in some cases endured well through 35 years of post-graduation life. As we get older, reunions are a time to talk about funny stories, shared experiences, failed romances and for the most part positive experiences. I doubt people go to reunions with the intent to resolve high school conflicts. For those not wanting to remember high school and to be honest I can understand who some might feel that way, they simply won't attend reunions. The times I have gone to reunions, I don't think as classmates as friend or not friend but rather as classmates with whom I shared my teenage years. Regardless of who we were, it is now about who we are and how maybe the person in front of you had some small part in the story that is your life. It's never too late to reconnect with people and there no rule that says you have to wait until some significant landmark date to hold a reunion. I have some friends ( of the non-high school variety) who have standing arrangement to try and get together every 6 months with high school classmates. A type of of standing invitation, those who can make it, great, those who can't maybe next time. Sometimes they are a large group, sometimes they might be a handful. However from what they tell me, it's always fun, always positive and has made their connection started in high school stronger. If you are a former classmate of mine from St Thomas and made it this far, doesn't that sound like something we might enjoy? just saying...............
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AuthorAfter many years of coaching at various levels and with different teams, I thought I would share some of my experiences and thoughts about coaching. Archives
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