Maybe the Real Treasure Was the Friends We Didn’t Make Along the Way…

My housemate recently had a friend from our high school over for a week. It’s not the first time we hosted someone from high school—one of my close friends visited back in July—but it was the first time one of us didn’t know the person coming.

(I was the one who didn’t know the person coming.)

I’m not sure how unusual this is, but I currently live with two people who graduated from the same high school I did. I suppose people who went to high school and college together live with each other all the time in the years right after graduation, so I can’t imagine it’s rare. 

But in our case, it’s weird for two reasons. The first is that our high school is over 8000 miles away from Grand Rapids in Manila, Philippines. The second reason is that the three of us only overlapped with each other for a total of three years there. In fact, one of my housemates I met at Calvin, not during high school. 

The friend who visited and I never overlapped at school. We were both in the class of 2016, but she left after our sophomore year and I arrived our junior year. 

Because of this, I knew of her but didn’t know her. 

Knowing of people is quite familiar to me. Growing up the youngest of four in a homeschooled family, it was easy to know of my siblings’ friends without knowing them. 

It wasn’t until I entered public school for the first time when I was in eighth grade, however, that I first experienced the “missed connection.” Where paths come close to intersecting but never do. 

Kids come and go in public school all the time, I know now, but there was something mysterious about the Gage who left after seventh grade. Why was he still being referenced by the eighth-grade teachers, despite leaving after seventh grade? Was I, a new student, a downgrade from this mysterious and apparently hyperactive Gage? (Probably in some eyes). Would I have been this guy’s friend? (Probably not).

I’ve always thought of the what-ifs—I think being adopted instills the realization at an early age of the idea of potential realities—but recently I’ve been thinking of the people I didn’t meet.

I’ve realized for a while that pondering over these scenarios is a pointless thought exercise that rarely leads to anything productive.

Still, I often find myself curious about them. What would’ve happened if I had started public school earlier? (I probably would’ve never gone to the school I went to in eighth grade because we moved districts my seventh-grade year). What would’ve happened had I not been homeschooled in ninth grade? (I probably wouldn’t have been so eager to move my junior year.) What if I had gone to the Philippines earlier? (That option didn’t exist.)

And with all of these scenarios, there comes an even greater set of potential people I could’ve met, interacted with, and befriended or enemied (how is there not an antonym for befriend?). What would those realities look like? Essentially, the movie Mr. Nobody but for me and less exciting.

I’m not the biggest believer in predestination, but the result of this belief is reconciling the pure randomness that exists if nothing is predetermined. Everything is fluky. Every single decision could carry significant weight, whether you know it at the time or not, and this could be paralyzing.

But the part I neglect the most in thinking about the people I didn’t meet is how those people would influence me. 

I’d like to think I’m steadfast in my beliefs and I still would’ve ended up more or less the same even in another environment, but I think that gives me too much credit. After all, I’m still trying to prove one of my high school teachers wrong after she pushed me out of her honors English class. (Totally not bitter that she pushed me out because I didn’t do the summer readings even though I didn’t even enroll until August…)

In some weird alternate timelines, I still probably end up where I am despite taking different paths. It’s not like me eating a sandwich instead of pasta on July 11, 2011, is going to diverge my entire timeline. (Or maybe it would have?)

I’m still learning to be satisfied with the current outcomes, but the more I think about the what-ifs, the more I’m content with the certainty I have now than the uncertainty of the potential other outcomes. 

Maybe it’s about the journeys that you didn’t take that matter just as much as the ones you did.

(And sometimes, you’ll actually meet the people you never thought you would, anyway.)