Reunions are tough.  I reunited with a number of folks at an event last night.  I shared a season of my life with them.  Some I consider dear friends who walked through tough times with me.  Others hurt me greatly, using my trust against me.  

Reunions are risky.  Re-entering a relationship, testing its health, worn by time. Will she remember that time I got loud on the phone?  Will he remember that performance review I gave him? I wonder where his marriage ended up?

Reunions are uncomfortable.  By definition, we share something in common in that we all went to school at the same place and even at the same time, yet you hung out with the intramural crowd and he spent time in the lab.  We have this shared experience, yet we didn’t share it at all.

Reunions are built on the differences within our sameness.  Indeed, we both worked there together, yet our experiences are most certainly not common.  Your experience in startup mode is quite different than her experience of the company during global expansion.  Same t-shirt, different games.  

Reunions are possibilities. This world is built on relationships.  Commerce, charity, care: all buying and selling on relationships.  Reunions are an opportunity to profit (from the latin for ‘progress’) from these relationships.  Over a pinot, deals are made and the best hiring happens over a cheese board rather than a board table.  

Reunions are restorative. Healed people heal people.  We certainly botched that project together and some things were said that were hard to hear.  Yet now you’re married and I have kids and we’re both employed elsewhere and you are once again “Brian," rather than the guy that threw me under the bus.  

Reunions don’t happen naturally.  Someone declares the third Saturday in October as ‘homecoming’ or prints t-shirts for the annual trip to Grandmas, declaring it a family union.  Relationships, formal or informal, past, present or possible must be shepherded.  

I’m grateful to be reunited with friends.  I’m grateful to see the hurting healed and the cocky humbled.  I’m grateful to see Carol and Jim and Ryan.  I’m grateful I’m not the same person I was then.