Haroon Zaidi: The trouble with staying in touch

             So, to be honest, I’m a little strange when it comes to goodbyes.  I’m generally not emotional at the moment, but then the next day or a couple days later, it finally hits me that it’s over and I feel to be honest slightly depressed, well that’s not the right word, moody would be more accurate as would be reminiscent in a slightly downcast way.  During the activity itself, there’s so much energy and activity going on, I take it for granted how well I’ve gotten to know the people and believe that the feeling will remain.  Yet, invariably it doesn’t.

The trouble with staying in touch is that people, get busy memories fade, lives continue.  Everyone is all psyched up at the end of the activity, they promise that they’ll miss each other, and needless to say there are always those few lifelong friendships that arise from the experience, but for the most part it degrades to just saying hi to people while riding your bike.

So you know what I decided, I will hit you all up to get coffee with you, to bum some free food (vegetarian risotto possibly), to have conversations about life and literature, you know, just that random stuff that makes experiences worth it, or so at least so is my plan for right now. 

Seriously though, we have so many awesome people in this class and I’m excited to see where they are all going to be in the next ten or fifteen years, then again maybe a part of the feeling is that it doesn’t last.  The sentimentalist and romantic in me are in direct conflict with each other, part of me wants things to last forever another wants them to end as soon as possible so I can start feeling nostalgic about it.  Maybe it’s best to leave this feeling untarnished as long as possible, to think how awesome these three weeks were, without risking losing the feeling.

I guess I can’t be as logical about feelings as I would like to be.  If you haven’t gotten the drift of this post yet, cut me some slack if its overly repetitive, it’s late: I think we should all stay in touch, there is so much more to do at Stanford, that even if we were to have only 2 or 3 meetings every quarter, we could never do all the things there are to do.  Even if we were to make a class there would still be so many other things.   After spending 3 hectic weeks with all of you, it would be a shame to let all of that fall to the wayside.  Enough palavering guys, I know there are still so many things I would like to do personally; we have over dozen extremely bright, talented, and diverse individuals, let’s make this happen.   
 

 Sincerely and in Continuing Friendship,

Haroon H. Zaidi