Ten Year Reunions and Evaluating Success

There are certain occasions that become, willingly or not, times to evaluate ourselves and what we've done in our lives. Birthdays and New Year's, for example, are obvious candidates for reflecting on the good and the bad, the successes and failures, of the previous year. This also turned out to be the case in the weeks leading up to my ten year high school reunion this Saturday.

During those weeks, I found myself faced with a continuous decision to make. Should I mourn the fact that I'm not exactly where I expected to be ten years ago in terms of a career and a family? Should I look back on those years primarily as a time when I should have achieved more? For a moment, I considered letting such negativity, along with the belief that the existence of Facebook has made reunions a bit redundant, prevent me from going at all. 

The second option, the more difficult one, was to acknowledge that life rarely goes how we imagine it to when we're teenagers. At the same time, it was to strive to be grateful for the exciting experiences I've had and the wonderful people I've met in the last ten years. It was to be thankful for the fact that I'm on my way to entering a career that I hope will be challenging and fulfilling and will allow me to make a small contribution to the world and the people in it. It was to let go of regret, of unrealistic expectations, of attempting to control every facet of life. 

More than that, choosing the second option led me to reconsider how to evaluate success. Should success really be measured in raises and promotions, in new cars and expensive wardrobes, or in how well we have treated others and been a positive force in their lives? These things don't have to be in opposition to each other. Often, the best way to care for the people we love is by advancing in our jobs and supporting them monetarily. What it comes down to are where our priorities lie. Are people more important to us, or things? God (or at least living morally), or money? Money isn't a bad thing on its own. Neither is having pride in the quality of work we do. But it is when we put material gain and selfish ambition at the center of who we are and how we interact with people that we begin to lose our perspective on what it is to be humans made in God's image.

Yup. That's me.

I like to think that I chose the second option more often than the first in the weeks before my reunion, with all the re-evaluations of success that came with it. I ended up having a great time on Saturday night. (It probably helped that so many people in my graduating class have always been nice and easy to get along with.) The reunion reminded me that we ultimately get to determine how we evaluate our pasts and fill our futures with meaning. We can feel sorry for ourselves, regretting that we didn't get the things we wanted when we wanted them. We can set ourselves up for a lifetime of perceived disappointments and feel like we got less than we deserved. Or we can try our best to be thankful for the road that God has led us down, learn from the missed opportunities when we could have loved God and neighbor more, and look forward to where we will be in our lives by the time of our next high school reunions. “The choice,” as my middle school principal used to say every morning, “is yours.”