Sometimes I need to shift into neutral and allow myself the luxury to pause and reflect.  This afternoon I find myself reflecting on the past 35 years, coincidentally, the same number of years since I graduated from high school—it’s okay to fast forward to the end to see if I actually tie this into anything worth your time, I can’t guarantee anything as of yet.  If I don’t come through, I’ll owe you one.  Maybe I’ll write something so obtuse at the end about reform that you’ll feel as though the fault lies with you for not understanding me.

So, we are to meet tonight—I have seen none of them since I departed for the Air Force Academy.  There is a reason I haven’t seen anyone.  The part I don’t get is why at this time we’ve mutually decided to end our hibernation.  It’s a little like the emergence of the seventeen year locusts times two.

We have only Facebook to blame for this folly.  I must admit it has been rather entertaining seeing pictures of them as adults, and reading how they describe themselves.

During my senior year I pulled my hair back when I ran.  My hair is no longer pullable.  I am some twenty pounds heavier than my playing weight.  I considered the drive-through face lift on the way down today, but thought the bandages would give it away.

Do most people go through this, wondering if you’ll impress those for which you held with such low regard, and they for you?  (That sentence was a bugger to piece together.)  At what point do we say this is stupid and move forward?  I’m guessing it must happen at year thirty-six or beyond.

I don’t understand my motivation in agreeing to come.  Is there an entertainment factor, some degree of closure, an in-your-face moment?  Is it because you get to look the high school bully in the eye and pretend he’s the parking attendant, tossing him the key to your Mercedes and ordering him not to scratch it?  What is it about those four years as opposed to any other four years that draws people back?  There is definitely something voyeuristic to it.  No other four year period in anyone’s life could exert that same pull.  Maybe that speaks to the transitory pattern of our lives after high school.

It’s the only time when we saw the same hundreds of people day in and day out for four straight years.  Maybe it had to do with having no responsibility, or maybe it had to do with bell bottoms, platform shoes, and long hair.  Relationships were built in the hallways next to our lockers—sort of a premature cohabitation—and lasted until the bell rung for home room.  New ones—upgrades—began to blossom on the school bus on the way home.  It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.  It was Nixon and Led Zeppelin, Peter Max and 3.2 beer.

These people with whom I am about to reunite, we are strangers once removed—by tomorrow I will know if it would have been better to have left it that way.  Some of them will never be mistaken for someone who knew how to calibrate ground-to-air missiles—perhaps they think that of me.  Some are poltergeists who  think of themselves as the Zeitgeists of my generation—I do not know what that means, but it looked like a good sentence as I was typing it.

There’s less than two hours until the foot lights come up and the actors have to move downstage to their positions.  I’m guessing that only the boringly secure have decided to play themselves.  The twelve-steppers are deciding which character to play on opening night and rehearsing their lines with their spouse or significant other—a term by the way which held no meaning in high school.  Costumes lay strewn across the hotel bed as the actors decide on the perfect, here’s how I turned out after thirty-five years look.  I find myself torn between the erstwhile bon vivant prepster and the Barry Sonnenfeld, Men in Black look.

Anyway, I’ve waxed and waned to the degree where I now feel completely marginalized.  I wrote in my year book that I wanted to be president.  A lot of these people are a few fries short of a Happy Meal, but I think even they will discern quickly that I fell short of that goal.  Nonetheless, I wake each day intent on slaying my personal dragons.  You?  Here comes the segue.

The time is coming where we will need to decide which character we will play in the roll out of our EHR systems.  Are there those who will break from the pack, eschew what others will say about their approach, toss aside the conventional wisdom of being in lock-step with the majority, and decide to approach this as a solution to a business problem?

I dare say that most will choose the path most traveled.  The path that says how wrong can I possibly be by doing what everyone else is doing.  Those who act on what they know is right, those who look for an EHR solution that rates future flexibility higher than the ability to conform to non-existing standards, higher than the gossamer guidelines of certification and meaningful use, will find that not only have they leapfrogged their peers, they will find that they have selected wisely.

Those who choose to follow the crowd may find themselves hibernating with the cicadas.