Some words, moments, and people can impact life beyond the ability to understand them or express them. They are formative or life changing. I’ve often thought that high school was the second most formative four year stretch in a persons life. The first four year stretch is from birth to four years old when persons travel from a gurgling blob of humanity to walking, talking, thinking humans, able to interact with the world and people around them. High school transforms a child into the first stages of adult life and accountability. We go from child relationships to imitation and actual adult relationships. We are at the edge of the nest taking the first flights.

High school, for my class, was a place to build foxhole friends, people with which you identified for life. We grew up in the same area, experienced the same cultural events and understanding, the same knowledge base of human discovery, and the struggle for self identity and growth particular to the age. We were a team, formed in the defining forces of our shared time during a same age in a specific location in all our individual diversity and uniqueness. Somehow, that bonding gave us a personal investment in one another’s lives. We belong to each other in a unique way that is different from any other group to which we may belong. These are the people who can ask about what you did with your life and have rights to an answer.

There is a beauty in that kind of belonging that seems to be increasingly missing in our world, as individuals seem to be growing apart and groups don’t form attachments as they once did. We have more tech, more communication, more ways to reach and be reached, and yet less depth in the commitment and connection within relationships and communities. My high school friends were all on the same launch pad, at the same time, jumping into the lives we would live and the people we would become. We saw each other walk across the launching stage at graduation, remembering our four years and wondering what would occur in our dispersal. Now we get together and can see what has happened and who we have become.

Humans truly need deep community relationships. It is something worth giving a lifetime to build or repair. I pray that the pendulum will swing back to deep relationships. We need each other to live a healthy life. Investing in the health and well being of others is always an investment which pays good dividends.