The perils and promises of nostalgia in Daydreaming on the Porch

“Today, researchers view nostalgia – ‘a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past’ – far more positively than their 19th-century forebears. Studies show that nostalgia can serve as a psychological resource that protects and fosters mental health, bolstering a sense of meaning in life and increasing feelings of social connectedness. But there’s a twist – nostalgia appears to be beneficial only when individuals feel a connection between who they are now and who they were in the past, a phenomenon psychologists call ‘identity continuity’.

“Absent that sense of connection between past and present, nostalgia becomes a painful reminder of what has been lost and can, according to researchers, lessen people’s willingness to embrace new opportunities and experiences. When people feel the past slipping away, and try desperately to hold onto it, they might sacrifice the long-term benefits of growth and change for the short-term benefits of security and familiarity....”

Deborah Rudacille
Aeon Magazine, 23 April, 2015

Normally I don’t worry about things like this. I have always been nostalgic and look wistfully at many periods in my past going back to my childhood in New Orleans in the 1950s and 60s. Is it any wonder I do this? As I’ve grown older, I tend to forget how difficult my early years were and instead look back fondly to those activities, pastimes, hobbies and experiences that brought me small measures of happiness. I’ve experienced some terrible failures and setbacks in life, as we all have, of course, but I also view these bad experiences as uniquely painful, especially since a number of them are seared into my memory and I relive them, have recurring dreams related to them, or just plain call them up more often than I should. They seem to pop up like ominous dark thunderclouds on a hot summer afternoon. Why is this? There must be a reason. What is there to counterbalance the bad memories?

During slow times at work, I find myself thinking back to childhood vacations in Sumter and Folly Beach, South Carolina. My father would take my brother and I swimming at a mill pond just outside of Sumter or to Poinsett State Park, ten miles out in the country. I loved it. To this day I revisit those places when I can. Second Mill Pond is no longer a public swimming lake, but Poinsett Park with it’s small lake seems stuck in time. Nothing has changed. My father and I never got along well, but those precious, brief good times on vacation were some of the few bonds we had. You never forget that. He also took us to the fishing pond of a friend of my aunt’s and we’d go out in a row bow and fish for brim. I recently wrote to the owner and that same dear friend of my late aunt and asked if it would be possible for me to revisit the pond and take some pictures. I am waiting to hear back from her. I am not sure if this is possible, but I hope so. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for the past couple of years ever since I took some back roads in Sumter County and found that very special place I had not seen in decades. That was in the summer of 2013, I believe.

I have fond memories of collecting stamps in the 60s. I find myself looking at copies of the magazine I used to subscribe to and actually wrote articles for while in high school. It was a heady experience. My first byline in a publication. When I retire maybe I should start stamp collecting again. It gave me so much pleasure once and was a true escape, a hobby I could retreat to and visit so many far-flung corners of the world through the stamps.

I’m nostalgic about my travels around the country 30 years ago, visiting so many amazing places I had never seen before. I’ve never had an opportunity to do that again. I often look at travel books and read about those places, longing for the simpler days when I was in graduate school or looking for a job and had nothing to tie me down. Never mind that it could be extremely depressing being out of work. I know what periods of extended unemployment are like. But somehow I made the most of those years of disconnection and uprootedness by getting out on the open road and seeing the country, year after year. Now when I look back years later, it seems like a dream that I recall in great detail. It helps, too, that the first two years of my travels I kept a journal which I can go back an read and relive those experiences through my writing.

Forty years ago I had a job that had an indelible impact on me and opened up so many previously unknown worlds of experience and opportunities to know remarkable people. I want to go back and visit my old boss and friend from those days.

Given what I have just written, I must now really ask myself what kind of connection is there between the person I am now and the person I was then, as Rudacille says in her article in Aeon Magazine. Fortunately, I do seem to see the larger picture here. I miss the variety of life experiences I had when younger including my years in teaching and newspaper work. Those were amazing, life-enhancing times. I had a number of jobs over a 20 year period. Now I have been at the same job for 20 years. There are wonderful experiences and new people to help in my job each day. It’s not that I am tired of it. But I can look back nostalgically to earlier years at my present job when I was very focused on a new career (I had to go back and get another master’s degree to continue in the field). I am settled now, but ironically, today I often miss the freedom that came with uncertainty and lack of permanent moorings in a place or job. For two decades now Charleston has been my home and my life.

In a sense I think I have earned the right to be nostalgic as often as I want. The person I am today was molded by all those previous jobs and experiences as well as the remarkable people I got to know. I am today the sum of all those experiences, the good and the bad.

It’s a different world today from even 20 years ago. Before the Internet changed our lives in so many ways, we had more direct contact with people, and we were engaged with the outside world much more often, especially when we were children. Gadgets, technology, smartphones, email and the thousands of daily distractions brought about by the Internet have changed me and most of the people I know in ways both good and bad, and profoundly. We can’t go back. But one way that I cope with all this change and all the terrible news about how we are changing our climate and world with potentially dire consequences, is to not think about it and transport myself back to the past. I can read Reminisce and Good Old Days magazines and books celebrating the past and simpler times. I can put nostalgic calendars on my walls at home and at work. I am connected to the past. I am nostalgic about many things now. But I don’t dwell there in the past, although at times I wish I literally could. I won’t let nostalgia become “a painful reminder of what has been lost” because what I have experienced can never really be lost anyway. The good and bad memories jostle for attention, they war against each other. But when I long for “the good old days” the good memories win, and as they say in New Orleans, “Laissez les bon temps roulez” – “Let the good times roll.” And that includes the good memories.

By the way, I mention this because one of the most powerful pulls back to the past now are my formative years spent in that city where I was born in 1951. I have not been back to New Orleans in 20 years, but the desire to revisit the city and the streets, houses and places of my youth is more powerful now that it has ever been. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about New Orleans.