Who Says You Can't Go Home

Words fascinate me. Take the word "reunion" for example. What exactly does reunion mean and furthermore, who cares and what does it have to do with a career-related blog? I'll start with the definition of reunion, a word I find not all that fascinating. According to Merriam-Webster, it is a noun that means: 1. an act of reuniting 2. a reuniting of persons after separation. The definition, though, I like; it intrigues me! And that's just what any number of my classmates from our high school graduating class did last week-end. We reunited!

A whole bunch of Baby Boomers came together after years of separation. We hugged. We talked. We laughed. We cried. We heard each other's stories of love and loss -- loss of class members, loss of a spouse or partner, loss of a parent, loss of a child, loss of a home, loss of a job, loss of health. We heard stories of success, wealth, prosperity, and philanthropy. We heard stories of disappointment, about how things never worked out and about how things didn't go the way we expected.

And no one cared about how skinny you were, or weren't, or if you had funky hair or no hair. It made no difference if you rode up on your Harley or arrived in your gas-guzzling luxury sedan. No one cared where you lived, or how you lived...we just cared that we still lived and could recall with such clarity memories from years gone by. Crazy Boomers!

One of my classmates, a man who devoted his entire career to law enforcement in the western part of the USA, served as our after-dinner speaker. His speech, Your Back Woods -- You Take 'em With You, was delivered to an audience who connected, an audience who knew what he said was true, an audience who got teary-eyed as he talked. The line he learned as a young boy had stuck -- work hard boys, work hard; and everyone - man or woman - who had touched our classmate's life since, soon learned his mantra, what he stood for, what he believed in.

As our speaker somberly spoke of all the rooms he'd been in during his career -- briefing rooms, board rooms, conference rooms, emergency rooms, back rooms, classrooms, waiting rooms, dining rooms, press rooms, meeting rooms -- he said what he'd learned is this: the more complicated the problem, the simpler the solution. I have thought about his words since he said them.

Reunion. Have you gone to one lately?

posted by: billiesucher

Comments

[Career Networking]

Its very interesting!