Little Folders of our Life

Last week I met Julian on campus for lunch.

He was here to take up a few EMBA electives. He had made the appointment with me via – you guessed it – Facebook.

Over lunch, we caught up with our news and activities. It turned out that as a past EMBA student with the school he could return to take up certain elective courses which he did not manage to take up while enrolled in the programme.

Whenever he was at our Asia campus for his programme, he would make it a point to meet up for lunch. Last week it was no different.

How nice to catch up with an old friend once in a long while. As our conversation flowed, I realized that I had known him since 1996, while at work. He was a broadcast journalist assigned to interview my boss at M1.

And then memories of what we did, how we progressed in our careers, started flowing back. Mentally, I was opening up files in my M1 folder, and retrieving data (or memories, episodes, events…) that I have stored away.

We both lamented how little we managed to keep in touch with other old friends. How starting a family and having little children had given him various constraints. Contacts these days are sometimes limited to Facebook comments and messages.

Friends make up our life, and our past. We may file them away in neat little archives and folders, like treasure chests, in our mental system, but they are still very much a part of us, somehow. I am so glad I managed to retrieve those folders during our one and half hour lunch.

The reminisce was affirming; the conversation was good.