What Nostalgia Is Trying to Tell You

This article is by Bryan Halferty:

It happens each time Facebook tells me I have “memories.” Everything shuts down, work, even–and ironically–a family dinner, and I dive in. My son is on a skateboard and he is smiling; I’m told it was two years ago. I am holding my wife and I have–sigh–a mustache; this is four years ago. Facebook, Google, Instagram, they all have their versions and they all know what they’re doing. The sight of our past selves documented with smiles, or sunburnt on beaches, stops us in our tracks. They know the charm of our  past. And, because I’m a recovering cynic, I’ll tell you with as much confidence as I can drum up: this gazing into the gone-by, even if curated by big tech, isn’t all bad.

There is probably a past moment in your own life that feels close to perfect. Maybe it’s coming to mind right now. It could emerge with the smell of a leather baseball glove freshly conditioned with shaving cream, your father’s secret trick. The sight of sand sweeps your mind off to childhood escapes at your grandparents’ beach house. You smell mulled spices at a coffee shop and all of a sudden you’re seven years old and smiling, looking up at your mother as you make cider together. It could be the sound of a song or the look of your friend’s velvet loveseat. Just last week it happened to me again. I dug through our family’s basement until I found a small plastic tote. It held my remaining baseball cards. Soon I forgot all of my typical Saturday responsibilities and had fallen into the plastic tote. I swam through my childhood, only coming up for air when I heard, “Dad, where are you?”

The Oxford dictionary tells us that nostalgia is, “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.” “Wistful,” “sentimental,” “longing,” the words evoke a desire for safety, past joys, or a childhood home. Is this what we’re reaching for when we pick up the old mitt or smell the sea?

It was the poet William Wordsworth, and other romantic poets, that first wrote about nostalgia as something positive. Before Wordsworth nostalgia was a clinical condition. A literal term used to describe the experience of depressed soldiers far from home. But while Wordsworth, and company, may have transformed the term itself but they didn’t invent the experience. Us humans have always looked backwards, with a mix of imagination and memory, to some lost, but once held, gold.

But these nostalgic memories are not precise — they are more poet than scientist. Lonely in a new city, it will tell you stories of your old city; it will paint images of friends, conjuring up sounds of laughter. It will pretend that the old was a place without pain. It will convince you that a return to the old will free you of all loneliness.

When my daughter was young I found myself lamenting her emerging adolescence. I wanted to, albeit briefly, fence her off from her teen years, keeping her from the casual cuts of middle school and everything else that would lay beyond. Keep making up words. Dance. Twirl. Don’t stop wearing your Halloween costume in May. This is common, parents often project their own fears onto their children. Others, like me, are reminded of their own loss of innocence in the development of a daughter or son. It is nostalgia, coursing through, inviting us to live through our children’s childhood with the hope of tasting a bit of our own lost Eden. But, once again, this is that “poet” memory employing creative license, the best childhood’s are only Eden-adjacent.

What if this home-ache was a holy instinct? What if, in each moment of nostalgia, you were actually beckoned deeper, past your childhood, to something more? Could the dim and lingering light of Eden hide behind and in between our ache and longings?

If so, nostalgia’s poetry can instruct our longings, pointing them past the sentimentality of baseball mitts and the smell of sea, towards what we all, ultimately, long for. Because it is not in returning to an old city or anything else, where we find what we truly desire. Our common ache is for a world without the paper cuts of gossip, loneliness’ dull throb, war’s uncountable evils, or our own regrettable temptations. C.S. Lewis, drawing from Plato, wrote, “A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.” Our crooked souls long for what we know must be.

We need not paw through our own past for scraps. Nor do we need to stack accomplishment upon accomplishment justifying ourselves with a bulletproof curriculum vitae. It is the church that confesses our empty belly will be filled in God’s finale as all that was lost will be offered back transformed–as a gift. There will be a table. Heaven and earth will wed. The dwelling place of God will be, again, with us. Eden, in the end, will be given back and any tear will tell a story not of grief but overwhelmed joy. In the end, nostalgia is not about the past, it is anticipation.