My guess would be that I have attended five or less school reunions. I believe that my last one was in 1998. My excuse for not attending more often was that the reunions were held on Saturdays and I had to be in the pulpit the next morning.
There is an all-school reunion being held this July. I will be sitting at table with fellow graduates from the great class of 1963.
I do not know all the personal and detailed answers to my own question...about how life turned out for each member of the class of '63. But I do know the generalized, the universal answer:
Life did not turn out as we had planned.
There are many good, successful, happy, life-loving members of my graduating class. I know this through some limited contact with some of them in the intervening years since we received our diplomas; through continuing social media contact with some; through snail-mail and email exchanges with some; and through hearsay.
There are a few members of my graduating class who are no longer alive. Events such as war, accident, and the rigors of life have over-taken them.
There are some for whom life has been more difficult than for others. More painful. More grief-filled. More taxing.
But for all of us, life has not turned out as we had planned, way back there in 1963.
And what is true for every member of the class of '63...including me...is true of every person who has ever lived...
Life did not turn out as we had planned.
Life did not turn out as we had planned; as we had thought it would when we were still young and very much naive about how life really worked:
About how life favors some and not others.
About the way that even the best intentions and preparations sometimes fail to shape the outcomes we desire.
About how often and how deeply grief, and loss, and guilt can affect us.
About the positive and negative ways that intimate relationships will mold and shape us.
About the depth of despair and the height of joy.
Maybe life was not all sweetness and light...maybe a parent died too soon; or worse by far, one of our children died; we found a lump, or a lesion appeared; affairs happened; the great job was lost; the drunk driver appeared out of nowhere and nothing would ever be the same.
And when life did not go as we had planned, we tried to mitigate the results with things such as destructive relationships, religion, addictions, compulsions, over-work, running-away, creating a false-narrative, over-indulging, shopping, acquiring, denying. And more.
Or maybe life didn't turn out that dark. Maybe we were dealt a better-than-average hand and we did pretty well at playing the cards we were dealt. Maybe we were kind, loved our significant others, successfully launched our children on their adult adventures, found faith (as different from religion), were employed in work that benefited the greater good. And more.
Either way, life did not turn out as we had planned.
We have seen troubles that we neither anticipated nor welcomed.
And we have been blessed in ways we did not ask for and did not know we needed.
(Thanks to Phil Gulley for those thoughts.)
Life would have worked out as we planned if we were in charge.
But we were not in charge. There were too many variables:
Other people, time, health (or lack thereof), deadlines, diminishing abilities and capabilities, education...and on and on.
Even so, we gave it a shot.
We tried.
We worked at it.
When we failed, we tried again.
My point here is this:
We've tried as we might to come to grips with the hard fact that life has not turned out as we had planned. Chances are good that most of us have adapted to how life has turned out in pretty fine fashion.
The past is the past.
Now is now.
What tomorrow will bring we do not control.
And we are OK with that.
We have endured all these years...waiting to see how life would work out for us. Our greatest strength, perhaps, is that we have outlived most of the stuff that got in the way of life not turning out the way we had planned.
Carl Jung suggested that the painful experiences of life have to be outlived...outgrown, and probably most of the Class of '63 have learned this up-close-and-personal; the hard way.
I expect to find out from my classmates that they are very much like me, and I am very much like them...in most cases. Life has turned out as it has turned out, and we have dealt with it in some ways that have helped and in other ways that have not; and we have learned from both.
But for sure:
Life Did Not Turn Out As We Had Planned.
But maybe, just maybe, along with author Anne Lamott we can find it within ourselves to say, "Hallelujah Anyway!"
