premature nostalgia
by lisa horak

Nostalgia, n. a longing for experiences, things, or acquaintanceships belonging to the past.

I’m suffering from a condition I’m calling Premature Nostalgia. The symptoms include great sadness and disbelief at the rate life speeds by. This syndrome tends to manifest itself in a profound desire to recapture the essence of the past, since it is so completely disjointed from present-day reality.

What has brought this on, you might wonder. Nothing special. It’s just that my kids are getting bigger, my wrinkles are getting deeper, and my memory is shot. I guess I should mention my age—38—so that you know that I’m not really that long in the tooth just yet, which makes this phenomenon that much more puzzling. Still, my childhood is now just a slide show of images flipping by, a montage of the photographs pasted into our family albums. And college—well that era seems positively unreal. I know I did all that college stuff—sauntering across the Quad, studying all night, partying with friends—but I can’t fathom it and can’t comprehend how it relates to the me of right here and right now.

This nostalgia, this wistful remembering and longing for times past seems normal enough. But I’m longing for even the not-so-distant past, say just a few years ago, times I desperately want back. Maybe this is a mid-life crisis or maybe I just have a really lousy memory, but because each life stage except this current one seems so distant I’m starting to question my memories of both monumental and everyday events, ones that brought both pleasure and pain. Perhaps some of this sensory amnesia, like the fact that I can barely remember when my children were babies, I can chalk up to sleep deprivation. But I have no excuses for the rest of my lapses. As my past becomes less vivid, I wish to re-experience my life and see if I can trust hindsight’s 20-20 vision.

So here is the real question. If even the recent past seems ancient, then what can be done to adequately savor this lovely present? Can we ever preserve it, or at least treasure it enough while still in the moment? For example, I know that my current half-halcyon/half-harrowing stay-at-home mom phase of life will be over in the blink of an eye. And so I find myself nostalgic for right now. I imagine me in the future looking back at me at this time and reminding me how good I had it. Ah, to be able to glimpse today through tomorrow’s rose-colored goggles! Surely then I’d finally see my life and myself clearly and accurately. I want to beat that wily trickster Perspective at his own game and gain the insights that we usually have to wait for time to unveil.

I believe that our society—not just me, I don’t think—is obsessed with capturing the present. Just look at how gleeful we are at the instant gratification made possible with our digital cameras. We can now see our pictures immediately and voilà, we suddenly have transformed real-time experiences into memories, changed the present into the past. And if the image isn’t exactly as we want to remember an experience, we just re-take the picture until we create an idealized memory right there on the spot.

But are we rushing it? Are we so quick to capture the present that we are actually missing it? Have we become the tourists who view life through the videocamera lens rather than through our own eyes?

As for my premature nostalgia, I’m attempting to chronicle our daily lives in scrapbooks and tell the stories that accompany the pictures. I do this to aid my own failing memory, but also because I want my kids and someday their kids to know what our life was like, how much they were loved, and what made us happy. During a recent snowy weekend, my girls and I watched old videotapes of them as babies. Maybe I needed some kind of validation that it all happened, maybe it was just to jog my memory, but it was an amazing, fascinating, and priceless gift to glimpse the past and re-live it for an instant.
Is it possible, I wonder, to miss something that is not even gone? I’m not sure, but the other day my younger daughter Isabel told me, “I miss home.” The only the thing is, we were home. But I knew what she meant. Because I miss home too—this home, when I’m not here, or even when I am, because what she really means is “I love home.” She also cried on her fifth birthday, because she didn’t want to not be four anymore. (The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!) She and I are indeed simpatico in this regard. To love our memories, regardless of when they occurred, is to me a sign of a life well lived.

It all makes me think of Carly Simon’s song “Anticipation” where she sings “Stay right here, ’cause these are the good old days.” How true it is.

 

Lisa Horak lives in south Asheville with her husband and two daughters, Molly and Isabel. In her spare time she hikes, makes beaded silverware, knits, volunteers in classrooms, leads a Brownie troop, and dreams of writing children’s books.