Don’t Call It Nostalgia

The feeling of nostalgia contains within it a longing for the past, regret, wistfulness and sentimentality – all of which create mental and emotional stagnation. For me, the past was then, this is now and the potential of today is always more compelling than the events of yesterday.

Nevertheless, the power of the past is contained in its creation of the present, and trips down memory lane are crucial to understanding ourselves and our world.

So perhaps I am thinking more of retrospection, reminiscence and reflection – the more positive acts of memory that are aspects of age. Twenty- and 30-somethings have not yet accumulated the distance of years necessary for perspective and they are - as they should be - too caught up in the busy-ness of career, family and children to be concerned yet with their personal history.

In her excellent study of aging, The Fountain of Age, Betty Friedan comments on Carl Jung’s second (of seven) task of aging:

“The need to review, reflect upon, and sum up one’s life. Baker and Wheelwright have found it remarkable how many old people feel an urgent need to tell their story before they die. Jung himself died shortly after writing Memories, Dreams, Reflections (‘I try to see the line which leads through my life into the world, and out of the world again,' [he said].”

And on Jung’s sixth task of aging, Friedan writes:

“Finding the meaning of one’s life, or ‘the real meaning of human existence,’ according to Jung, involves coordinating, in old age, one’s important memories, bit by bit, with important outer happenings, until ‘a sense of one’s archetypal ground plan is revealed, and through it a reason for existence,’ which connects us to historical and universal meaning. Jung wrote: ‘A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species.’”

It was nothing quite so high-falutin’ that I experienced on two long train rides last week. But the trees and towns whizzing by, the rocking coach and the special nature of the train’s whistle seemed designed to bestir daydreams and reflection. A rare opportunity, removed from the hurly-burly of modern life with its excess of responsibilities and distractions, to wander in the back alleys of mind and memory.

There was enormous pleasure in revisiting the best and even worst of past experience. “Wow. Yes. I survived that.” “Whatever would I have done without knowing her.” “I probably should have married him – well, too bad.” “Yes, I still hate that boy who beat me out in the spelling bee. I clutched on a stupidly simple word.”

“And wasn’t that scary, that day in Tangiers, when two dozen street peddlers backed me up against a wall, all shouting their wares.” “I must go back to Jerusalem one day and walk the streets of the Old City again.” “Why, oh why, didn't I ask my parents more questions while I still could?” And more…

None of it seems to add up to anything like what Jung and Friedan talk about – at least not yet – but it is important for elders to recall our pasts, tell our stories (to ourselves and others) and not dismiss them as nostalgia. We’ve all seen the amnesia movies and know that it is our experiences alone and our memories of them that create us, define us, make us who we are. Without them, we are blanks, like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Unless you are stuck yearning for times gone by, don’t call it nostalgia, and make some regular time, if you haven’t, for reflection. I suspect that even if “a reason for existence” or “a connection to universal meaning” eludes you - as it does me - that may happen over time and with persistence. In the meanwhile, there is enormous personal satisfaction in reviewing how you got this far.

Comments

[Tamar]

Now you *know* that *I* agree with every single word of this post!

Wonderful!

[Winston]

Jung's observation focused thru Friedan that "...coordinating, in old age, one’s important memories, bit by bit, with important outer happenings..." leads to a sense of our reason for being, is so dead-on powerful!

Many of us never achieve that sense because our lives are consumed by the evolution from dreaming of the future to survival in the present to yearning for the past.

[Kathy Holmes]

Just found your blog. Love it - so insightful.

[Marja-Leena]

Ronni, this is very moving, beautiful and insightful. "it is our experiences alone and our memories of them that create us, define us, make us who we are" - I learned this when my father succumbed to dementia in his last years. This inspired me to create a small series of prints called Memory/Dreams. Thanks for your voice!

[kenju]

I agree with it all too. This is at least a part of the value of my blog to me - as a repository for my memories - so that those who come after me will have a better sense of who I am and how I got to be me.

[bonnie]

Thank you for the research on Freidan and Jung. I must read it all for myself.
I have been writing my own personal history as I have the time while being the caretaker for my Parkinsonian husband. I began almost two years ago and have not yet completed it. Writing takes a certain discipline and writing about difficult memories takes a certain frame of mind. I have to be feeling strong and ready to re-examine those times and events. Good memories are easy to write. We also tend to put the bad times behind us and focus on the good or the present or the future as a means of survival.
The interesting question is to whom am I writing this collection of my sometimes one-sided memories? I think I am writing to some unborn great grandchild who might be curious about the ancestors.
I hadn't realized that I might be searching for "some universal thread of meaning" to my life, but it bears consideratioin.

[M Sinclair Stevens]

Along these lines I recommend the movie "After Life". The central question of the movie is, determine the one moment in your life which you want to carry with you into eternity. That memory defines you. The director, Kore-eda, came up with the idea from watching his grandmother slip into Alzheimer's and wondering, if we have no memories, do we lose our identity?

Anyway, it's a beautiful little movie and the beginning sequences show a variety of real people, young and old and from all walks of life who were interviewed whose real stories he mixed in with the fictional ones.