Well, we are into the New Year and the heavy nostalgia we indulged in over the holidays has gone, or has it?  At this time, looking back to the old year and past years, we often do a kind of stock-taking, a look at our life’s balance sheet. Sometimes, we look back with longing, and that kind of yearning we call nostalgia. Of course, these memories rarely resemble reality. It’s as if we are searching for an anchor, a benchmark of a perfect time in our lives. Whatever Eden we remember with nostalgia, one thing is for sure, and that is that we can never fully restructure it into the present. Wishing to do so can only cause suffering. Remembering happy times and places can give us the strength to go on, but being stuck in our memories can only bring on a feeling of melancholy, and eventually depression at the impossibility of ever having those good times again.

But were they truly good times, or do we just selectively remember them that way? People are very good at colouring the past. Many of those memories may not actually have been so good while they happened, and perhaps our present yearning makes them appear more attractive. Nostalgia rounds off the sharp edges of times that may not have happened as we remember them. “Good old days” often depend on a bad memory.

Psychologists seem to think that it is at times of transition that the past pulls us most strongly, and certainly moving into a new year could be counted as such a time. We may be full of hope, we may be full of fear for the coming year, either way we are tense and as Owens Lee Pomeroy reminds us, that at such times “Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: you find the present tense, but the past perfect!”

According to researchers, men’s nostalgia is triggered mostly by views of dated cars and sports equipment - an antique Chevrolet, an old, favoured hockey stick. Women, on the other hand, can be apparently dissolved in memories by the touching of textiles or china: a lace doily that went under a favourite vase, a teacup celebrating a coronation.

Whatever has triggered the nostalgia, memory lane seems to lead most of us to pastoral moments in our childhood.
 
*watching a child
dancing with her shadow
and suddenly
I’m longing for my childhood when
my feet skipped along the clouds*

Although a small-town girl myself, my nostalgia, oddly enough, is for a time and place I never really experienced - it is for a thatched cottage in a hedge-rowed English village. Later, as I tried to recreate it on five acres in Ontario, I found the work to maintain the property was killing, and though in my fifties, during those years I looked as though I was in my seventies. In my nostalgic reveries, I had discounted the lack of plumbing, the servitude of the farm labourer, the woes of poverty, the wretched social system that kept the cottager pulling at his/her forelock as the lord of the manor swaggered by etc., not to mention the extreme fire-hazard of a thatched roof. My dreams had all been Miss Marple’s village or that of Midsomer Murders (sans the killings). Nostalgia, for sure, does not involve critical analysis.

Researchers say most nostalgia is for our teen years, which I find amazing since that hormone-jangling time is more associated in my mind with angst. However, I will relate that my husband does burst into song (as we lie in bed listening to the oldies and goldies) when tunes from his adolescent years come on the radio. We have a slight dilemma here for I am 14 years older than he, and so I lean towards nostalgia for Bing and Frankie, while he is with Elvis and the Beach Boys. We found a happy solution for our musical nostalgia though with a station that covers 70 years of music, thus including both of our musical memories. 

There is nothing like a tune to set memories going of supposedly better times. It’s odd that wartime melodies bring back floods of reminders, for even though they were bad years, they were also wonderful in the camaraderie, the breaking down of social class separation, the togetherness in a single aim that they provided. The other day, I picked up a first edition copy of the sheet music for “Lily Marlene” and although that was a song of the at-that-time enemy, in some strange way it became one of ours too. The wartime songs of 60 years ago have the ability to swamp a person with nostalgia. For the British, the name Vera Lynn brings up a slew of titles – “We’ll Meet Again” and “The White Cliffs of Dover” are a couple that spring immediately to mind, and even though I have only once had a glimpse of those white cliffs, somehow when I hear the title, let alone her voice, my eyes water up.

Healthy? Unhealthy? Nostalgia, though thought to be value neutral, leans slightly to the negative. When I am overly nostalgic, I ask myself “Is it that I am so discontented with the present, or so dreading the future, that past memories seem to be sweeping over me a lot these days?” A critical analysis of the past, for example thinking the humanity of small-town main streets was more cohesive for a community than shopping malls on the outskirts of a town, is emotionally neutral. Most memories aren’t. I think a brief mourning of good times never to return is appropriate, but absorption in the past and the melancholy that hangs over such memories is not. Just as too many daydreams of how the future might be can shatter the present, so too strong a yearning for things long gone can drain us of the energy we need to make the here and now as joyful as possible.

Perhaps we are, for the most part, less nostalgic these days than previous generations since most of us lead highly mobile lives: living in many different places and changing occupations several times. So, it is hard to select at what time or in what place to fix our nostalgia.

this lifetime of
so many moves that when
I have a longing
to go home, I can no longer
recall where it would be

JANUARY 2012 SENIOR LIVING MAGAZINE VANCOUVER ISLAND