Part Two: The Memories I Haven’t Made Yet

Welcome back. I hope last week’s essay didn’t make nostalgia sound entirely depressing... hah.

Last time, I started to dive pretty deep into chasing nostalgia, especially the feelings we received from certain times, places, or things from our past. To be honest, I got pretty bleak by the end about how trying to relive the past can really harm your future, and I wanted to make sure that I took this time to write out that it’s all about how we chase nostalgia that can influence whether it has a positive or negative effect on us. I promise I’m not over here being so doom and gloom.

Nostalgia Can Still Tell Us Something Useful

With that, I don’t think we should stop revisiting the past. If that’s what you took away from last week, then I apologize, but I promise you that I have zero interest in pretending that I’m going to stop collecting cards, replay old video games, listen to Take Care another 100 times, or think about old friends who were important to me. When we do these things, they bring us genuine happiness, and who are we to stop ourselves from experiencing that? I also think that our past can help us understand where we came from, remind us about who we used to be, and maybe show us what we need to work on reintegrating into our current life. It could be a pretty good identifier to tell us about what we may be missing in life.

Some examples? Well:

• If we’re thinking about old friendships, perhaps we need more connection in our current life
• If we miss how excited we got over the small things, maybe we’ve allowed productivity and cynicism to take up too much mental space
• If we miss how free we felt during the Summer, maybe our current lives need more unstructured time
• If we miss a version of ourselves who did things without them having to become useful, then maybe we don’t actually need to recreate the past; maybe we need to reintroduce some of those qualities into our current life

The goal isn’t to become a child again, but to identify what we understood as younger people that we have forgotten with age. I think a lot of us over time forget how to be carefree like we were as younger individuals, and more importantly, how optimistic we might have been during those periods of life. I might not always have known what came next, but I definitely used to be more excited about uncertainty than I am now.

I’m also not telling you to try and recover your exact old life, because I’m not sure any of us would actually want to. Growing older has given me independence, a beautiful relationship, some amazing experiences (Japan!!!) and opportunities that I only imagined back then.

A lot of us need to remember that we have parts of our lives that were once the future we dreamt of, and that’s pretty amazing.

The Memories I Have Not Made Yet

So here’s another way to approach this, from a more positive lens. I wonder how many moments in our current life that we’re underestimating because they don’t feel nostalgic yet? Lazy Sundays with Isa may seem uneventful now, but I wonder if years from now I will miss our apartment, our dinners, the random drives to trading card shops, the cats hanging out beside us, and the freedom to spend an entire afternoon trying to decide what show we want to binge on the couch. Even this period of unemployment may contain things I eventually appreciate, like the time to write, work on personal projects, reconnect with friends, evaluate my career, and simply exist as me outside of a demanding job.

That also doesn’t mean that I need to enjoy every difficult moment that comes up, or try to turn every hardship into some form of gratitude. I think it’s OK for us to have parts of our life that are simply hard, and those can definitely be left in the past once they’re done.

I do think I want to be better at not focusing on trying to recover so many old feelings that I fail to notice the new ones developing in my life. The hard part is that new memories aren’t going to announce themselves as important, and most of the time these ordinary days are going to remain as that until enough time passes and I can realize they belonged to a period of life that’s now over. That’s the ironic part about chasing the past; while we’re living through a time we later miss, we are distracted or focused on a time period that’s already happened and fail to recognize it.

I Don’t Want to Stop Looking Back

All of that to say this: that doesn’t mean I am telling any of you (or me) to stop looking back. We all have people, places, things, and versions of ourselves that we love. We want to visit them, and we should. Nostalgia doesn’t need to be a weakness, because as I’ve mentioned, sometimes remembering where we came from is how we can understand what matters. I just think there’s a difference between remembering and returning.

The past isn’t going to give me exactly what it gave me the first time, because too much of that feeling depended on who I was, what I knew, who was with me, and what had not happened yet. Perhaps the best way to honour those memories is not spending our time trying to reproduce them, but instead taking what they taught us and using it to build something that can belong to who we are now.

Because as I mentioned, one day in the future, this day will be one of the memories you try to return to.