Yearbooks Evoke an Inevitable Nostalgia

Looking through high school yearbooks is a nostalgic experience for almost everybody. Those years are unique, and whether they were fun or frustrating, great or terrible, there is something special about them. Even if we spent our high school years wishing we were someplace else, they always seems somehow sweet when we look back on them.

Those four years are difficult for everybody. We go through immense changes. Our bodies change. Our emotions are spun out of control by hormonal surges. We learn, and what we learn sometimes shakes our intellectual foundations. We want our freedom, but we're still tied to our parents financially and emotionally. We're still kids who want to play, but as we look more like adults we're expected to behave more like them as well.

Although the bonds we make during high school are probably the strongest of our lives, high school is competitive. Whatever objective is important to us, whether it's making the starting line of the football team or getting into a great college, we have to compete with all the other students who share that objective. What's more, the physical and hormonal changes of puberty create, for the first time in our lives, a drive toward dominance. We establish a hierarchy, and we naturally want to ascend to its apex.

There is also fierce competition between the groups of people pursuing each objective. The kids on the starting line think football is important; the kids on the Honor Roll think grades are important. Anybody who invests heavily in reaching the goal they set for themselves also invests him- or herself in the idea that the goal is worthy and is, in fact, more worthy than any other goal.

High school is also a time in everybody's life that is defined by planning for (and dreaming about) the future. Whether it's dreams of professional success - drama geeks writing Oscar speeches, athletes dreaming of winning a pro championship - or the innocent plans made by almost every high school couple to get married and have kids, we let our mind stretch forward through the years ahead of us with abandon, disregarding the impracticality of our dreams.

After we graduate from high school and grow up, our lives rarely resemble the plans we made in school. Our bright, shiny dreams come crashing into cold, immovable obstacles, and life becomes more about squeezing between the cracks in obstacles than about rushing, uncontested, toward the objects of our ambition. Our romantic inclinations change. Events for which we can't plan create profound changes in our lives. We survive, sometimes driven by our own ambitions and sometimes reacting to the world around us.

Over time, high school fades into the past. We leave behind the part of us that is so vibrantly and awkwardly alive during that time. That part of us doesn't fit into the regimented lives we lead as adults. It fades away as life moves on and changes us, and as we gain experience and change the directions and dynamics of our lives.

But our high school yearbooks capture that time - the friends we had, the objectives we worked so hard toward, the niche we found for ourselves when we were at our most insecure. The value of those volumes is that they provide a portal to the past. We can go back any time we want. We can go back and remember.