Nostalgia: Google and Oxford Languages say: “a sentimental longing 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
Vienna Teng
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
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)
Indigo Girls, 1990
To light a clearer path
Every five years or so I look back on my life
And I have a good laugh
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.