Nostalgia is both illusory and instructive. It can be very dangerous if indulged or even wallowed in, in a self-deluding way. Yet the instinct is there in all of us, I suppose, for a wistful longing after a "happier" time.
The monumental paradox being, needless to say, that "the happier time" was almost never essentially happier.
Sure, there are exceptions. Sometimes absurdly stark, like wishing you were no longer in the concentration camp but back there where you had a home, joy, freedom, hope.
Apart from such extremes, though, there was as a rule almost nothing essentially happier or more carefree about the times we long for nostalgically. Indeed, if we are brutally honest with ourselves we will recognize, often, that the days we're wistfully pining for largely constituted a far worse period of our lives than the one we find ourselves in.
Yes, indeed, sometimes our nostalgia wings us back precisely to "the worst of times." Consider nostalgia for the 1940s war-era atmosphere--the bravado, the music, the styles, the stiff-upper-lip pulling together to make the best of it. What nostalgia does at its worst is to obscure the reality that those were days people were dying (literally and otherwise) to bring to an end. Whatever might have been the best of it was summoned up just to survive it and, please God, move on to something better. Nostalgia tends to cut that dark part out, the feelings that are much too traumatic to be happily re-lived.
So what is it about the past that nostalgia pulls us back to with such a visceral tug, even to what we must objectively call life's darkest passages (consider nostalgia for the 1960s, a horrible passage of American life)?
My impression is, nostalgia pulls us back to the past precisely because we survived it.
No matter what happened there, good or bad, we got through it. On that level, for us at least who got through it, all of the past is...safe. It's a story with at least a provisional happy ending. Though we are still here, and our stories are still unfolding, we know at least that certain chapters are over and we got through them. There is a kind of psycho-neural (I'm no neurologist but I'm sure there's something chemical about it) satisfaction, a rush of calm and nirvana-like peace, in being able to view, as from the hilltop, an entire episode or passage of your life knowing how it all came out. Knowing how it all came out presents no further danger, threat or anxiety. Rather, there is a sense of mastery, victory, achievement in it, and that's a lens through which you view the entire episode... just as if you knew all along it would come out that way. As if you went through that whole thing with the retrospective calm and satisfaction you feel now.
But of course, you didn't.
There's the rub. That's where the nostalgia-haze can hypnotize and delude.
You didn't know then any more than you know now how things will go tomorrow. Back then your nostalgic instincts weren't tugging you to view your present as the warm, cozy, unthreatening story you now look on it as; rather, the instinct was tugging you back to a yet earlier, neatly encapsulated segment of your life. It's how nostalgia always works.
In 1966 nobody was nostalgic for 1966.
Nostalgia and anxiety, like oil and vinegar, don't mix. At least, not during the same episode. Anxiety in your present episode will catapult your nostalgia-instinct to the past, certainly not to the present.
Can one be nostalgic for the present moment? Not, naturally, in the sense of looking back upon the past, but is it possible to feel about the present moment the way nostalgia makes us feel about past episodes?
I think so, yes. And in that I find the instructive quality of nostalgia.
Nostalgia rightly steers our thoughts to periods we lived through (obviously, since if we hadn't lived through them we wouldn't be here now!), and perhaps the lesson that instinct is attempting to communicate can be put like this:
"Look, you made it through that; you'll make it through this. Those days that were so hard, they are now the concluded past, for better or for worse they are done, finished, and you are now something more, even something better, because they're part of your ineradicable past, the forever-treasury of your life-story. Well, this moment, too, is also your past--that is, it will soon, even in the next breath, be your past as surely as all those long-ago moments are--and you are right now in the process of living through this 'past' just as you lived through that past, and you can understand it in exactly the same way, as part of the forever-treasury of your life-story, a life-story constantly making you something more, something better, no matter how hard it seems now."
How much more so when we walk by faith.
In the light of God's horizon, of Christ's promise, everything we go through right now is virtually the "past" in comparison; we can view it "nostalgically," as already part and parcel of a forever-treasury that we know will gleam like precious jewels. Because our lives have been swept up into the inifinitely conquering story of resurrection and redemption.
"Nostalgia" needn't be pathological, but it can be. Its real lesson isn't that "things were so much better back then." Its better lesson is "Life conquers, and nothing you're ever in is bigger than what you are."
So keep on building your "past" today; the power is yours today to create tomorrow's past, tomorrow's healthiest "nostalgia"--for yourself and, most wonderfully, for others.
It isn't essentially about what's going on around you. It's essentially about what you are being, and how, and for whom.
In this vein I recall the apostle's words to 1st-century Christian slaves who had little to no hope of earthly release from their bondage (and the apostle was certainly in no position to do anything about that): "Whatever you are doing, work at it with enthusiasm, as for the Lord, not for people."
Slavery was no fun. Neither was WWII. Neither is the war in Ukraine.
Yet isn't it something how people manage to look back with a wistful sigh at terrible times--not for what was happening, but for what the terrible times inspired them to?
The lesson is to live that way now.
