I heartily encourage the contact. I’ve had a whole variety of experiences doing this, but the key is, by making the contact (or being open to the contact if one of them reaches out to me), I’ve been able to get a more complete picture of what happened back then, since all I had going in was my limited memory of events, necessarily from only my perspective. Obtaining theirs makes the story more complete. In some cases, there wasn’t that much common ground anymore, so it was just the contact, some time catching up, then both realizing that we moved on for a reason. And that’s okay. In other cases, there’s been the realization that life just took us in different directions, but the fires of friendship still burned brightly, and the rekindling of it had added a great depth to my current life. All in all — it is well worth the risk. I’d definitely encourage it.