After going to school with your classmates for four or even twelve years, its hard to imagine ever losing touch. Once you graduate though and realize that everyone is going off to their own schools, jobs or travels it becomes heartbreakingly clear that staying close will be hard. Losing contact with your classmates is unbelievably easy to do even when by accident. Its taken most of my friends about ten years to figure out that they left so many people behind.
The thing thats said most about this is not to worry. Frankly, growing apart is just another one of those many facts of life that like to sneak up on us. The good news is that growing apart from one person usually happens because youre growing closer to another. The bad news is that often brings with it feelings of guilt. In the first stages of our lives when we go from one education to the next we end up leaving behind old classmates and welcoming in new ones over and over again.
At first this may all sound quite trivial. But when you think about it youll see that it is a rite of passage engrained in our culture. All of our lives are built upon memories of friends and enemies that have grown out of the...