One of my Christmas gifts from my spouse this past year was a compact book titled There is No Right Way to Meditate – it’s filled with art and writing by the author Yuri Sakugawa, printed on smooth heavyweight paper, and just generally a pleasure to hold, read, study, and page-turn. This page popped up the last time I had it open. I just went to open it again, still on this page, and decided I just need to sit with this one for awhile longer because its almost exactly what I mean when I think about my stated ‘theme‘ for this year.
Those little black and blue squiggles at the bottom are really what my brain feels like sometimes – so much, too much distracting me and sucking energy away from the things I’d rather put the last few (hopefully) decades of my life toward. Sigh.
Nostalgia: Google and Oxford Languages say: “a sentimentallonging or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.” Merriam-Webster brings in a sense of excessiveness and possibly irrecoverability, in addition to sentimentality: “a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.”
I find myself, almost always, temperamentally allergic to feelings of nostalgia. At most, I would characterize what I feel sometimes – where someone else might deem themselves nostalgic – as a soft, resigned, affection. The resignation because whatever I’m feeling affection for is almost certainly long gone. (I’ve been having a lot of dreams lately about my time on a small residential campus as an undergrad – I think it’s because we’re starting to think about whether and where my son (a high school sophomore) might go to college. If I think about it too much I could have dozens and dozens of ‘if-onlys’ and regrets about all the wasted opportunities from those four years – but none of that is changeable now, so I don’t dwell on it.)
Relatedly, I finished Maggie Smith’s book Keep Moving today, and it was this short bit near the end of that book that made me reflect on my usual aversion to feeling sentimental about the past:
Let go of the narratives you’ve dragged around for years: you are not who you were as a child, or in year X, or on day Y—at least, not only. You do not have to fit yourself into those old, cramped stories.
Be yourself here and now.
Keep Moving.
Maggie Smith, Keep Moving
Two other song lyrics also popped into my head – this, from Vienna Teng’s latest song “Riversitter“:
you don’t have to tell a tidy story you don’t need a home for every hole you can just sit in the river, let the river run to you you don’t need to trace your last ancestor you don’t need a family name of old you can just sit in the river, let the river run you through
Vienna Teng
And this, from a 35-year-old Indigo Girls song, “Watershed.” A lyric I shout out every time it pops up on a long car drive somewhere because it is so, so true for me.
And there’s always retrospect (when you’re looking back) To light a clearer path Every five years or so I look back on my life And I have a good laugh
Indigo Girls, 1990
Every five years or so (and sometimes more frequently) I do look back on my life and have a good laugh. Five years ago right now was pre-pandemic, pre-lockdown, pre-middle-school for my now high-schooler. I was in a different job, had just begun my first leadership position at my UU church (which mushroomed into an extremely intense set of activities and work that is still ongoing), and we didn’t yet have our dog Colby (who fills up our days with doggy goodness, now.)
The past is important and there’s absolutely lots of learning to be done and that should be done by reflecting on it – but I don’t have time or energy for much regret, wistfulness, woulda-coulda-shouldas, or if-onlys. I’m definitely with Maggie Smith on this one – KEEP MOVING.
I’ve been slowly making my way through the book “Held: Blessings for the Depths.” A wonderful small collection of blessings and writings and prompts and art published by enfleshed, a spiritual organization focused on collective liberation. I really get a lot out of keeping them on my radar. The prompt I worked on tonight was to find a word from each of a set of several short pieces of writing on previous pages, and then to create (write) a blessing of one’s own from it.
I found the words as I read through the pages once again, but decided that the collection of words that I found, in the order I found them, with some additional punctuation, was a lovely found poem. So here you go – the title was added after punctuating the poem.
