I had a school reunion recently. Our twenty years out. I was a bit anxious about it, overthinking it. I had expectations about how it should be with my old friends — how I would be around them and how I’d be perceived by them.

I’d known that the twenty year reunion was coming up (maths!) and I had been looking forward to it for months. But as it approached I got nervous that I wouldn’t “make the most of it”. I worried I’d be boring. I pictured groups of friends having fun together with me on the periphery, no longer getting the jokes.

For some friends, I wanted to live up to a perception I had in my head of being clever or funny. I wanted to be interesting — to have interesting things to say. I wanted to show I’d grown up, not grown boring. I wanted to have effortless conversations. The worst case scenario was a night of awkward silences in conversation with a group of friends who used to use laughter as punctuation.

Then I came across the Ship of Theseus — a thought experiment that helped me reframe things and release some of those unrealistic expectations.

The ship

If a ship goes in for repairs and replaces its sail one day, then it has its mast replaced, followed by its deck, its hull, steering wheel and so on until over time each distinct part of the ship has been replaced, is it still the same ship?

What if the old parts are restored and reassembled? Which of the two is the real ship?

If you paid for it, you’d say that the repaired version is the real ship, but a historian might argue that the ship created from the original materials is the Ship of Theseus. The answer depends on perspective.

The parallels with personality and identity resonated. There was an original and there is a present version — outwardly both look alike. Many parts have changed and some parts stayed the same. The childhood version isn’t the same as the adult version. Being the sum of our experiences makes that inevitable.

So which is the “real” version of the friend you remember from school? Which is the real version of yourself?

Both but not at the same time.

“You’ve changed, man!” — a phrase we’re supposed to fear, is just a statement of fact. There will be class historians who insist the school versions are who we are. That’s their perspective. I now prefer to see the reunion as a point in time and school as another. Who we were at each point was real then and is real now.

Realising that released me from my expectations. It didn’t have to match the old days; time travel wasn’t necessary. I hoped I’d still recognise the old hulls (even if some had a bit more timber on them) and the masts. Change in each of us was inevitable but it was just as likely some parts stayed the same. Given the right context, those parts would surface.

I could just go along and see how it played out. I could enjoy it as much as I wanted and there was no pressure for it to be anything other than what it was. It didn’t have to be a recreation of a moment from twenty years ago. It didn’t have to be anything.

It played out just like that. Some people had changed in familiar ways — parenthood, careers, life. Others barely seemed different at all. People had turned up because they wanted to be there. It never felt like it needed to be anything more than what it was.

Change of tack

I loved school days. I also love being a dad and knowing where I stand in my career. The twenty years that have passed weren’t nothing. Even if I think about my initial worst case; the awkward silences, it makes no sense. With all that time passed and experiences lived, how can we not have something to say?

Getting the gang back together doesn’t have to mean reenacting old times — reminiscing about them as who we are today will do.