Kemp’s Creative Happiness Blog

How about adding your profile to a web page that re-connects old school mates? A page such as classmates.com Who knows – you might get back in touch with your old clique, share and laugh about ‘Then and Now’ pictures and tell each other what you’ve been up to over the years. Maybe that class-clown turned into an accountant and the jerk into an actually nice person.

The subject is also wonderfully covered by Philosopher Roger-Pol Droit as a one of 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life:

(…) In adolescence, when one hasn’t seen a friend for a long while, the experience is both amusing and disturbing. The mixture of amusement and uneasiness comes from the fact that features remembered clearly are now accompanied by breasts, and hair, and everything else that is growing in those years. You see your smaller selves in grown-up bodies. And that’s bizarre.

Adults can go for longer. Ten, twenty, thirty years without seeing one another. The anticipation in the restaurant or the cafe, wondering if you’ll recognize each other and in what guise, with what wrinkles, all the wear of time. It’s a rare mixture of apprehension and tenderness, and you scarcely know whether the apprehension is for yourself or for the other. The tenderness likewise.

And then the strange incredulity with which – having recognized the other instantly (how? the eyes? the smile? the angle of the head?) – you scrutinize those ravages of time. The other person has aged, clearly. You too, as you’re aware, though you can’t see it. And then, in a strangely moving way, time’s terrible passage hits you with a sudden dread, obliquely, as you suspect that you, also…