Scatter-brained thoughts on our capacity to adore the mundane
As someone who has always been pretty sentimental and defensive against change, intense feelings of nostalgia are well known to me. When transitioning into new stages of life, I tend to glance back forlornly at the seemingly perfect bygone things. Nostalgia is a powerful emotion: an arresting amalgam of pleasure and grief. Sometimes it’s warm and fuzzy, a happy reminiscence triggered by a loved song or film from years ago. At other times, it’s a stabbing feeling that surfaces in the quiet hours of the night. In those dusky hours, it can feel a lot like loneliness.
Growing up, I moved schools and countries every couple of years. Each time we left for some new city, I remember not being able to fall asleep at night for a while, conjuring up rose-tinted memories of friends and familiar places that I had called home. Ruminating, plunging deeper and deeper into that longing—it was like satisfying a sweet craving.
Endlessly indulging in this sensation, though, is a somewhat melancholy act. It disorients your sense of existing in the present. The more you revisit those perfect, unattainable images of the past, the more oversaturated they become, against which your current reality hopelessly greys. Perfect, whole, forever unrecoverable times. Such a consuming form of nostalgia is intertwined with a fear of facing the uncertain future. It becomes a medium of obsession over an image of your life you have full control over, one that is completely self-curated. In the face of new experiences that perpetually shift into shapes and atmospheres you can’t immediately make sense of, you retreat into it. I’ve found myself moving through whole weeks like that: mournful and dazed. It all too easily consumes us. But, taking a closer look at these glorified bygone times, their contents are often mundane details. Snippets of what were then unremarkable facets of day-to-day life. The sweet, stinging memory of a childhood evening spent with family, the same tedious walk back from school on autumn afternoons, the familiar scent of an old building—the intensification of these small details begin to hold so much meaning. This powerful effect of nostalgia speaks to our ability to harvest intense joy and feelings of belonging from the smallest of things. All the annoyances and anxieties that were surely present in these memories have all long evaporated. It is a remarkable optimism.
And it is an optimism that we should harness. Let it propel us into facing the here and now. In other words, we should calibrate that idealizing framework with how we perceive our present reality. Trust that all the exasperating worries will be resolved and forgotten soon enough—that the transient blissful moments stay with you and form parts of who you are, becoming lasting pieces of your history. Notice your emotional relationship with the world that you’re always building. That is not to say that it’s easy, or feasible, to constantly “see the bigger picture.” But the point is to try to see that you’re made up of one continuous, ever-flowing stream of experiences. That all the blissful memories are held within you. And, finally, that the normal you take for granted is full of things worth cherishing. Of this, nostalgia serves as a stirring reminder.