AHSS The Gift of Years: Nostalgia (Lesson 31)

There is no perfect, no ultimate, no crowning stage of life. Whatever we are now, that is it. If we privilege one stage of life over the others, we stand to miss their pulp. “I have no romantic feelings about age,” Katharine Hepburn once said. “Either you are interesting at any age, or you are not. There is nothing particularly interesting about being old – or being young, for that matter.”

It is good to think back, to remember the people who got us going and doing the things of life and didn’t let us quit. It is good to know where we’ve come from so that we can measure the distance from here to where we are going. It is good to remember all the joys of life so that in dark times we can have confidence that the good times will come back.

It is not good to make the past the acme of our lives. Youth is not a shrine at which we worship once we have moved into another stage of life. It is not good to resist becoming what we are and wishing instead to be what we are not. The temptation, far too often, far too common, is to try to freeze life in place, to become fixated in one phase of it or another, to fail to move beyond the moment.

One of the clearest signs of the way different people view life lies in the way they deal with the death of those dear to them. For some it is the day life stops moving. They stop in their tracks, paralyzed with pain, steeped in loss. For others it is a crossover moment in time. These people face the pain and set about to move with it but beyond it. We’ve all seen both approaches to the end of one phase of life, the beginning of another one, but it can take a while before we understand the implications of what we are doing.

Indeed, life does go on. We cannot arrest it. We must not arrest it. It is not possible to live in the past, however much the temptation to try. If life is for the living and we do not live it, we doom ourselves to premature death. What’s even more pathetic, we do it in the name of the very relationships and places and events that brought us to growth in years gone by. These very seedbeds enable us to trust that new growth will come out of the darkness within us now.

There is a thin line between memory and nostalgia. They are not the same thing. Memory is a recollection. Memories enable us to have faith in the future because they remind us that the past has been so life-giving, so full of hope in all the tomorrows of life. Memories do not so much immerse us in the past as they prod us toward the future. Nostalgia is immersion in the past. It traps us, one foot in the present, one foot in the yesterday. But the melancholy of nostalgia is not the geography of old age. Possibility is.

Nostalgia is a dangerous temptation to confuse love for part of life with love for all of life. It substitutes the delight of the present for the fantasies of the past. It is pining and yearning for what was good for us in the past, but which would be totally out of kilter with the here and now. It is a snapshot of the past, edited to suit us. It is a beguilingly dangerous temptation of old age, this return to an unreal past. It tends to exaggerate the life lived and destroy the life being lived. It affects the way we look at life now. It shapes what we talk about. It makes us interesting for a while, maybe, our stories and their charm – but then it makes us not interesting at all. Ongoing narratives, endlessly repeated narratives, of another time. People do not look to the older generation for nostalgia. They look for wisdom, for courage, for proof that life in all its forms is not only possible but wonderful.

Sister Joan says: The burden of nostalgia is that it takes us out of the present and immobilizes us in the past. The blessing of nostalgia is that it can serve to remind us that just as we survived all of life before this, grew from it, laughed through it, learned from it as well, we can also live through this age with the same grace, same insights – and this time, share that audacious spirit with others.

1. As sister Joan indicates, “Katherine Hepburn once said, ‘Either you are interesting at any age, or you are not.” What are three characteristics you have that make you interesting at this time in your life?