I still haven't found what I'm looking for

The first thing that came to mind when Dad asked for a song to go with the powerpoint presentation of photos he had prepared for the YWC reunion, was Jim Sturgess' cover of the Beatles' Revolution. Tried it. Didn't work. Too lively. The second thing that came to mind was the a line from the Postal Service's Such Great Heights: "everything looks perfect from far away." How fitting, I thought. Tried it. It worked. Sentimental not sappy. The lyrics were a bonus.

However, when we arrived at the reunion we experienced a bit of technical difficulty. The track was missing. Dad, in a panic, was about to insert some random CD from his car when I remembered I had some stuff in my thumb drive. I could have sworn I felt a light bulb ding over my head. There in my thumb drive was U2's I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For. Urgent vocals. Iconic theme. The lyrics were a bonus. Perfect.

Kind of an in-joke, I guess.

It was one of those reunions where the past was not entirely welcome. Every project started at the YWC has either stalled or failed. Half the project members have vanished. The other half, lost and disillusioned. Few showed up at the reunion. This was understandable since we were all expected to deliver reports on our projects. Nobody relishes reporting a failure. Except perhaps me. I had maintained during the camp serious doubts about how far these projects could go. It was sweet vindication and bitter shame to announce that our project Vox Discipuli was, in effect, a failure. The camp's facilitators are (and I have it from a very reliable source) close to despair, which is saying something since most of them are hardened optimists. I can imagine them shaking their heads: why can't we get those bloody kids to do something that sticks?

Hence the scheduled pep-talks. Hey kids, you weren't asked to succeed. You were asked to try. This mantra was repeated again and again, each permutation more encouraging than the last. I assume it worked because by the end of the meeting we were feeling like success stories waiting to happen. Our failure was only temporary. A minor setback, that's all. Lack of motivation be damned, we felt like running out and singlehandedly reviving our projects. Almost.

In truth what happened was anything but wildly enthusiastic revival.

It was a sober wake. The reports were eulogies. The short speeches were the words of consolation one offers to the bereaved. Although one might expect otherwise, no fingers were pointed and no names were mentioned. There was a hint of humility and great personal responsibility in the air because we recognized that the true mess-ups were not our projects, but ourselves. At last there was some semblance of closure. Now the projects had officially failed, they could be put to rest. For good. We could stumble on if we wanted to - which is why Vox Discipuli will remain standing - but consider the matter closed. Hey, we tried. In a room full of optimists, one might dare say we did good.

Our projects might not have fulfilled their objectives. The reunion might not have been what it was meant to be. We YWCers might not have been everything we ought to have been. Perhaps everything we didn't want turned out to be what we needed. Heck, there wasn't a thing that turned out the way we wanted it to. But since when, really, did we have a clue about what we were looking for?