Reunion.

This will be a bit of a rambling post, with an only-just-about coherent topic and mostly just a collection of thoughts. You have been warned.

It's been about a week since Ramadan ended, meaning that it's been about a week of Eid/Raya celebrations. Despite Eid being only a day, and is celebrated for as long in most other countries, in Malaysia it tends to last for an entire month. Given our culture of open houses and there only being three to four weekends for them to be held in, I suppose that's understandable.

I recently attended an open house. It was at the family home of a Rembau classmate, thankfully not too far away from where I live. He and his family had one last year as well, which I also attended. This time around, though, more of our Rembau batchmates showed up, making things into a mini-reunion of sorts.

The thing about meeting up with your old friends is that you get to catch up on their lives, and they get to catch up on yours. Inevitably, and especially when you're all the same age, comparisons are made, in quiet if not out loud. It's normal to feel inferior when your friend from school is currently doing 'better' than you, or to feel superior when he or she is doing 'worse'. Such thoughts are only natural, and there's nothing to be ashamed of for having them. How you act upon those thoughts is far more important.

The way I like to look at it is by looking at life as a really long road trip. Having being born in the same year, my batchmates and I started off on our respective journeys at the same time, give or take a few months. Each of us have our own advantages and disadvantages, which all play their role in deciding how fast or how smoothly we all move along.

The main thing to remember about a road trip is that it's not a race. It doesn't matter how quickly you move along, so what difference does it make how much faster someone is going, or how much slower? You'll still get there in the end, and at your own pace.

23 years old and not yet graduated? Cool. 23 years old and single? Alright. 23 years old and without a clue what to do with your life? No problem. Whatever you're looking for in life, you'll get there eventually. And if you don't get what you want, maybe it wasn't what's best for you anyway. Just have a little faith.

Anyway, enough of that. Back to the reunion.

There were some people I'd either not met or spoken to in years, either at the open house or at the futsal session a few of us had later that night. Maybe I'm better at reading people now, or maybe my friends have simply changed as time went on, or more likely a combination of both, but I noticed things that I hadn't noticed before. There were certain characteristics that, for whatever reason, I'd never associated with these people. Depending on what they were in relation to the certain people I associated them with, I was either pleasantly surprised or mildly disappointed. Nevertheless, it was nice to meet up with my school friends again. These people were a large part of the best years of my life (thus far), and a bit of nostalgia every now and then is always nice.

There is, of course, that niggling feeling, nay, knowledge, that things will be different in the future. We're all going to grow up, get jobs, start our own families, and eventually get so caught up in our own lives that it'll be difficult to meet up like this even on an annual basis. That's life, I suppose, and that realization should be a solemn reminder to live in the moment. We should appreciate what we have while we have it, because there will come a time when we won't have it anymore.

Personally speaking, one way I appreciate the moment I'm in is by learning from it. Quite a number of people I saw at the reunion were from rather different fields of study to mine, and from rather different study institutions as well. I think I took good advantage of that; highlights from the day included a discussion on developmental psychology, stories of money-saving shenanigans abroad, and a conversation with a friend on said friend's struggles with depression. I really learned a lot that day.

I suppose it's time for us all to return to our lives now. I'll just wrap up this post by saying that I'm looking forward to the next time I meet up with these guys - reunions don't come around often, but it's their elusiveness that makes them all the better.