Regaining contact with old circle brings joy and grief

I recently decided to get back in touch with some of my old schoolmates, as it had been a few years since we were in contact and I missed them and wanted to see how they were doing.

So, I decided to venture into the world of social media, something which I had previously maintained a rather aloof attitude toward, criticizing those who use it for just mainly sharing useless and facile information.

Now I realize that I was very wrong. For too long had I underestimated the "social" value of social media.

Within days of actively using it, I was back in touch with a number of old schoolmates, and about a week so later, I am now back in touch with literally hundreds of people, mainly in the United Kingdom, who I used to know one way or another, all the way from my oldest friend since we were 5 years old to colleagues and friends during the time I served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Britain in the mid-to-late 1990s and also when I worked as a reporter and later news editor at the Morning Star newspaper in London from the mid-1990s until the early 2000s.

Mixing in so many circles I built up a lot of contacts, but in those days social media did not exist and it was a lot harder to keep in touch with people who sometimes could be passing acquaintances.

Now I am regularly chatting with people I haven't contacted for as much as 25 years, and it's really nice to almost pick up where we left off.

But sweetness often is accompanied by some bitterness too, such as hearing bad news I otherwise would have been oblivious to.

And when I heard it, it was not just a shock, it shook me emotionally. I had joined a discussion group of ex-classmates from my secondary school. In this, I found out that two ex-classmates had already passed away, one of them last year, she was in her mid-40s, but the other one was over 10 years ago when this lady was just in her mid-30s.

It's the first time in my life that I have had to deal with such news involving my contemporaries. I couldn't believe that these two, who I knew as children, are no longer with us that information was very hard to take in. And when faced with this, it naturally makes you consider your own mortality.

That's why I will treasure my newly revived friendships even more now, as life is not a rehearsal, it is a one-act play, and there is no time for regrets or missed opportunities.