What is life, other than attempting to impress your high school friends years after they have ceased to care?

I have my nose to the glass of my high school reunion. The old cliché is that you want to enter your high school reunion with money, recognition and a full head of hair, but to play into that hand is to play into the hand that made high school miserable in the first place.

Caring what others think about you is a special kind of hell.

Why do so many people subconsciously dedicate their lives trying to please old ghosts?

I have a theory. Call it Gordon's Inverted Pyramid of Experience. It goes like this: Imagine you have an upside-down pyramid balancing on your forehead. This pyramid holds all of your experiences. Your earliest experiences are on the pointy bottom, and your most recent experiences are on the broad base high above your head. Your first Halloween carnival, your first love, your first heartbreak – all of that is toward the bottom. What you had for lunch is on top.

You obviously have a huge pyramid if you've lived a long life, but all of your later experiences are experienced through the filter of those earlier ones. That is why our early experiences matter most in how we interpret the world.

My grandmother, who lived through the Depression, freezes leftovers she will never eat. The abject wordless fear I felt walking into first grade still haunts me every time I enter a party, or climb on a stage. Damn. Even as I write this, that emotion is as fresh as rain.

So the Inverted Pyramid of Experience is why our high school associations can hold such sway. I know some people look back on their high school or college days with a wistful eye. Don't. Life is Now and always has been. That's a quote by either me, Buddha or Ferris Bueller. Take your pick.

Fortunately, high school reunions are not what they used to be. Facebook has made the school reunion somewhat irrelevant. Most everyone worth catching up with has been thoroughly stalked and chatted with online. The high school reunion is nothing more than the fact-checking of Internet pictures.

But I will be there, head held high, not for anything I have accomplished, but because I learned that ultimately we are all in the same boat, struggling to live meaningful lives against long odds, even if we once rowed against each other.

That realization is my greatest accomplishment.

Hear Gordon on "The Ticket" KTCK-AM (1310) weekdays from 5:30 to 10 a.m. E-mail him at gordon@gordonkeith.com.

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