Time is a strange thing. One day you’re counting the seconds between “Now Serving” numbers, the next you’ve realized 20 years have gone by. We all have our own lives and trajectories. Our goals, our wants, our aspirations lead us to places we never expected, away from people we once knew. Away from people we swore we’d never leave. But so is life, and here you are.
But thanks to technology, we’re only as far from someone as we want to be. People every day reconnect with long lost friends. People even connect with others they’ve never met in their lives. The options and the opportunity for interaction is now endless.
Here are the best ways that you can find your friends long after you parted ways.
Checkpeople.com
We’ve all had that itch to just Google someone. You know, when a name randomly pops into your head and you have the uncontrollable itch to search them down to every last detail. That is, of course, once social media fails. We try to use different combinations of words, add high school names, street names, something that sticks. For instance, you’d try to find people with the name Wilson, and then narrow it down to their alma mater. Unfortunately, Google isn’t the best engine for that. Checkpeople.com is a much more efficient search engine that can access public record for this particular purpose. It’s your only reliable shortcut through the buried and time consuming volumes of info you’d have to sift through to reconnect.
For those who are aren’t too far removed from the person they’re trying to reconnect with, social media might be a good buffer to the conversation. I know it might be a bit awkward, and sending a random message, only to have it buried under Facebook Messenger’s “unread” queue, isn’t our ideal form of interaction. But using things like Twitter and Instagram can give a direct line to a person you just want to say hello to. It might spark some level of shyness, but all it takes is a simple hello and some small talk to reconnect with someone you’ve been wanting to say hi too for a long time.
Greeting cards
If you want to go really, really old school, send a holiday card. Physical letters have gone out in fashion lately. And with local mail services being less and less reliable due to the diminished volume, it’s understandable that one would want to go digital. But for family and friends that you haven’t seen in forever, a good holiday greeting card puts the memories in their hand. There’s something to the tactile feel of a letter that activates pathways in our brain that a simple email or Twitter chat cannot. And for that reason, even if you do find them on social media or checkpeople.com, a nice letter is always a great anchoring detail.
We are so fortunate to be living in an era where we can seamlessly communicate with virtually anyone. It’s GT to a fever pitch lately with all the different rants, raves, and opinions flying across the internet. But with all of this inclusiveness and strangeness that people interact with every day, a nice and thoughtful hello to an old friend might be the best thing to brighten both of your days.
