It has been 25 years since my college classmates and I left university and ventured into the world, armed with our degrees and knowledge learned inside the four walls of the classroom.

Some of us ventured into finance. Others dove deeper into psychology and organizational development. Others dove into marketing and business management.

It was interesting to see how varied our paths have been. Some ventured into marriage and parenthood. Some others remained single. At least one went to the priesthood.

For a short while, I reveled in the familiar voices of my university days. Same old laughter and shouts that filled my college days reverberated through my laptop’s speaker last night.

It was great to see those familiar faces and hear those voices again. For a couple of hours, I was thrown back to the past. And I realized how much I missed my classmates.

Then it dawned on me: I am longing for the past that we’ve all had. I am longing for the same old lives that we had that’s were likely no longer have. I miss the people who no longer are the same people from twenty five years ago.

In other words, I am longing futilely.

That’s t the trouble with longing: one longs for a frozen point in time. But time does not stop and freeze — it trudges and soldiers on regardless of what we feel about its passage.

And when we look back, we look back at frozen snippets of our lives that can never be real and here again.

My psychotherapist says that I have a complicated relationship with my past. Or that I complicate my relationship with my past too much. For one, I yearn for it. But in the same breath, I fear and about it.

I am still trying to live with my past. It is a work in progress. When the time comes, perhaps I can look back to the past with a different view and a different vantage point. Till then, I am going to look back with caution.