You can't return home again

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Returning home again can hold many surprises and prosaic moments. The comfort of familiar faces, the warmth of childhood scenes, relishing fond memories, and most poignant of all – reconnecting with friends of old. Going home again is a strange admixture of the certainty of the past with surprises of unexpected change. Old friends are the best example of this – – the comfort of a shared youth you know so well and a conversation with a nostalgic warm flow are interrupted by turns of fate you never imagined.  We somehow project an idealized fate for early friends and are taken aback by unexpected surprises while filling in the lost years.

Catching up on old acquaintances, getting filled in on the story of people's lives – – here's where many surprises lay hidden. Discovering significant life success from 'kids' you thought were headed for a dead-end, and the other way around. The high school classroom stars that took a wrong turn – – stories of alcoholism, families abandoned, chasing after waning youth.  Stories of long ago friends, shared from the perspective of old men, recalibrating a mutual starting point in our mutual youth and fast forwarding life stories.

My trips back home brought a palpable comfort --the feeling that all's good, being back home where things are safe and you are taken care of. Rediscovering the long lost sense that someone is taking care of you, momentarily easing back home where life is provided for, feeling a freedom of spirit protected by home's safety net. A feeling unutterable by words, but present none the less. A sense of returning from a long lonely trip to home where super viligence is out of place, letting down your guard. As if your parents reincarnated to the perfect nurturing age --- setting you free again to explore without danger -- going out to play and return when the street lights go on --- to a loving home where all is taken care of.  Isn't this the way it's supposed to be, the safe harbor after the long journey, we return home, the warm womb of home where all is well, to tell the story of our adventure.

There's a historical perspective the return trip brings, a framing of one's life story, on a canvas bordered by where we started and where we are now.  Hearing early buddies confirm our sense our history’s beginning juxtaposed to where we are now --- seeing the contrasts, synergy, the preordination.  Seeing the storyline of our life unfolded from the beginning. Making sense of our life story, looking for its poetry, our path in hindsight seeming more like destiny than the random meandering it felt like. The unspoken agenda being played out is valuing and honoring our respective life paths. The homecoming gift here is that only close early friends can co-narrate this retrospective –especially close friends that shared dreams.

There’s a magic conversational ‘peek a boo’ going on here --- we each vacillate between our customary adult personality but revert way back to silly adolescence by our teenage view of our friend. It’s ‘now you see me, now you don’t’, the inner child resurrected and disappearing again.  Belly laughs and exuberance fill the air, gifts we soulfully miss as adults,  that’s reserved only for the young --- but here we cheat our old age and laugh like kids again -- a ‘peak’ into our former innocence – home again, young again. For moments we forget age and we’re right there where we started --- what a gift. George Bernard Shaw said 'youth is wasted on the young'; there's no waste here, this gifted glimpse into our youth is celebrated and savored.

Our peek-a-boo conversation with a two-headed personality gives a rare glimpse into who we really are. My reconnection with home and friends happened well after my retirement, and my close childhood friends likewise were retired. Each had already decompressed from a career personality --- the veneer we wore to be successful was wearing off.  As an entrepreneur I had to belly up to high risk and assume responsibility for a company, and I always assumed that the ‘take charge’ mentality I had grown into was a gift.  The Zen of this homecoming adolescent behavior sheds our pretenses, to open and see our real authentic personality.

Who are we really?  The take charge entrepreneur who only focuses on opportunity, or the mischievous child who fixates on humor? The hyper vigilant high risk taker, or the cavalier story telling dilettante?

We are both. The long years looking only upward at a career latter stifled the inner child, and now he peeks out, a bit unsure of himself, both joyful and fragile. The rebellious silly inner child seems at diametric odds with the driven entrepreneur businessman – but in truth, the early rebellion was the seed of an offbeat vision the enabled the entrepreneur.