Most people are prisoners, thinking only about the future or living in the past. They are not in the present, and the present is where everything begins.
~ CARLOS SANTANA
Nostalgia is defined as “a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.”
Nostalgia is bittersweet. It’s remembering a time when all seemed easier, better, more peaceful, more in control. The first time I remember having a real pang of nostalgia was when my kids were teenagers. Nostalgia for the days of footie pajamas and them being small enough to be picked up and physically put in bed for the night while I was up late waiting for them to come home was almost physically painful.
Those warm, fuzzy recollections of “simpler” times failed to include the intense exhaustion, frustration and stress that came with having a houseful of little ones who required constant care and supervision, or the never-ending battle of wills, or necessary disciplinary measures, or the gnawing worry about their safety, their health, their futures, and whether I had what it took to raise them to adulthood.
Nostalgia shows us heavily filtered images of the past. Like edited photos and Instagram filters, nostalgia erases, or at least blurs, the flaws and failures that exist in real time.
I think of this when I hear people expressing longing for the “good old days” when America had “values.” Which good old days are we talking about, exactly? And whose values? Those questions are never clearly answered by those caught up in the throes of nostalgia, because nostalgia leaves out all the messy, wobbly bits.
The Puritans who arrived on the shores of the New World were hoping to escape religious persecution (from other Christians, by the way) under the theocratic monarchy from which they came. The founding fathers who penned the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were themselves embroiled in the slave trade that was part of the culture at the time. Roll the clock forward to the mid-20th century — which seems to be the current shiny example for American sentimentality — and recall the divisiveness of McCarthyism, the Cold War, race riots, unchecked misogyny, and all the other uncomfortable societal woes that were happening during that era (and every other era).
The point? Nostalgia is a wildly deceptive illusion. Like all illusions — movies, TV, fiction — it can be an enjoyable temporary escape, but it’s not reality, and we can’t live there, nor can we recreate it in the present.
By NIKI TURNER – editor@editorht1885.com
