How to Live With Nostalgia?
Am I just supposed to keep feeling this way? What am I to do with this aching in my heart for a past I know I can never be a part of again? I think I've found an answer, and I wanted to talk about it.
Last night, by pure chance, I watched a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode that spoke directly to the thoughts I’d been piecing together for this article.
The episode titled "Remember Me" is about Dr. Beverly Crusher, the ship's chief medical officer, who begins to notice that crew members are disappearing from the Enterprise—and no one else remembers they ever existed. At first, she questions her sanity, but eventually realizes she's trapped inside a collapsing static warp bubble that's swallowing everything.
I've been reading a lot of texts about nostalgia to help frame my thoughts on it, and somehow I stumbled upon this exact missing piece that gave me clarity.
You see, my mother and father, 65 and 71 years old, respectively, are leaving us.
They are immigrating to the United States, and will most likely stay there for the rest of their lives.
They've spent all their lives in the Philippines and they've never visited another country before, so to say that they're going to leave a big hole is a vast understatement.
I'm feeling it. Every day when I think about them, my mind keeps drifting back to my childhood days when our home, which was adjacent to my grandfather's and grandmother's home, was the locus of family activity. Every birthday and holiday celebration was held there, being where the patriarch lived, and it was just a place brimming with life and activity. As a young kid, I'd find myself weaving through adults talking, eating, drinking beer, singing karaoke; playing with my cousins in endless games that stoked our imagination. And my mother and father would always be there, in the thick of it, serving food to guests, happily catching up with relatives.
These images of my former home never fail to come to me, even in my sleep. I would dream that I'm walking familiar streets, getting lost but not quite, and ending up before the gates of our home. But usually, our home would look different, and it would fill me with such unease. I knew in my heart it was the very same home, but something happened to it and it didn't look quite right. I would be reassured because my mother would be there, waiting for me or cooking something in the kitchen. Only then would I feel comfort.
Am I just supposed to keep feeling this way? What am I to do with this aching in my heart for a past I know I can never be a part of again? I think I've found an answer, and I wanted to talk about it in this piece.
The Sheer Panic of Nostalgia
"It's not just people. Everything is disappearing!" - Dr. Beverly Crusher
Before I saw the Star Trek episode, I never realized what was missing in the descriptions of nostalgia I've been reading. They didn't mention panic.
Under the bittersweet film of longing for things past we know all too well, there is, in nostalgia, sheer panic—an acute fear that our world is slipping into an abyss of non-existence, of nothingness, and that we would be left alone without a story that tells of how we got here, or of who we are. There's a dread of being decontextualized.
In the episode, Dr. Crusher is visibly unnerved every time another crew member disappears and nobody but her remembers them. But she is most frightened when her own son, Wesley, vanishes as she's talking to him.
I couldn't help but see a reflection in how I was feeling. My parents have been such an essential part of my life that the prospect of not being able to see them again face-to-face for a very long time, feels as if an entire world is being wrenched out of me, sucked into a collapsing vortex of space-time, and I'm helpless to stop myself from becoming less than who I was.
Edward S. Casey, in his philosophical essay, says that what we're yearning for in nostalgia is not just a return to a place, but to a world:
In being nostalgic, what we seem to miss, to lack or need, is a world as it was once established in a place. This world is revealed through the localism of a place but is not reducible to locality per se. - Edward S. Casey
That's why returning to a physical place alone typically can't cure nostalgia because what we miss is "a world, a way of life, a mode of being-in-the-world." Sometimes, coming home actually worsens nostalgia because when we return to the place we're nostalgic for, we find that it has changed, like in my dream: the chairs aren't where they're supposed to be, the walls have been repainted, people are missing or have been replaced by other odd faces. This striking strangeness of something so familiar seems to deepen that feeling of decontextualization even more.
But what is this decontextualization? From what am I being decontextualized when this panic of being left behind takes its form as nostalgia?
In Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur, in his reading of Augustine, delves into what time really means for human beings. The truth is, while we typically think of time as "cosmological" (as if it's part of the physical universe), the way we experience it is actually in the soul or in the mind. This is important because, if we reject the cosmological definition, we're able to see that narrative gives shape, meaning, and direction to time. It is narrative that takes the chaos of lived experience and unifies it into an intelligible story.
And we need stories to make sense of our lives. I want to see myself as not just a random person with a name, but a person with an arc. My life has a plot: I came from a poor family who was nevertheless happy; I had parents who despite their hardships gave me the best education they could pay for; and I emerged from that education with an ability to alleviate our poverty. This is my narrative. It tells me that I had lived a meaningful life, and that my parents are a central part of it.
The panic that I feel in bouts of nostalgia is this narrative straining to cling to its fundamental elements—the characters: my mother and father. Without them being here where I can see them and touch them, will my story survive?
Will I continue to be me if the story adds a drastically different chapter? It's a decontextualization from a personal narrative that I fear. And if I leave it unchecked, I'm afraid it might consume me.
Where Recollecting Alone Fails
Needless to say, it can be hard to live with nostalgia, these pangs of melancholy and homesickness that creep up on us. So again, going back to my question at the beginning: what to do with it?
It's worth noting that for hundreds of years, nostalgia was seen as a medical condition, and it was as such that Johannes Hofer, a Swiss physician, first described it in his 1688 dissertation. He presented it as a neurological disease often afflicting Swiss mercenaries longing for their homeland.
It was not until the mid-19th century that it became to be seen more as a psychological or emotional condition, rather than an actual disease.
Modern psychological perspectives on nostalgia support its useful effects, even health benefits. Tim Wildschut and Constantine Sedikides reviewed empirical research and concluded that nostalgia is "an ambivalent, yet predominantly positive, emotion." They conceptualized it as a "resource that can be implemented to cope with distress."
Further, the world we're longing for in nostalgia is filled with people, and Wildschut & Sedikides noted that this longing is a process of reinstating symbolic connections with past figures to bring them into the present. Through this perspective, they theorized that nostalgia may have social health benefits, as well. They found that nostalgia actually "boosts social connectedness, that is, feelings of being loved, protected, connected to loved ones, and trustful of others."
So while it's hard to live with nostalgia because in its mild form, it can be disruptive, and in the extreme, it can completely detach us from living in the present, nostalgia itself seems like a feeling that can potentially be transformed for good.
But how? Instead of nostalgia dragging us into a black hole of unproductive pining for a past we can't recover, is there a way to take the reins and steer it into something useful?
I believe so. But first, we should stress the fact that recollecting alone might not help, as we saw, for example, that returning "home" to a place changed doesn't quell the homesickness at all, and in fact could exacerbate it. Returning home is a way to recollect, but by itself, misses the point of nostalgia.
Recollecting fails because the object of nostalgia is not an isolated moment in time that we experienced. When I get nostalgic about my parents and our home, I see glimpses of faces, food, celebrations, even dogs we once had; I hear noise, merrymaking, voices of my grandparents who had already passed away—but there's not one single memory that makes up my nostalgia. The world of nostalgia, Casey says, "exceeds" the grasp of memory and calls for imagination. With imagination, we somehow bring these disparate pieces of memory and give it some form.
Plain recollecting devoid of imagination has a parallel in Svetlana Boym's concept of "restorative nostalgia," which is a kind of nostalgia (as a historical emotion) that's so obsessed with the restoration and rebuilding of a homeland with "paranoic determination," that it can actually result in the erasure of memories.
"Reflective nostalgia" contrasts with restorative nostalgia in that it does not try to rebuild a mythical place called home. It thrives in distance to tell a story that connects the past, present, and future. It can even be a creative force as in the case of exiled writers and artists who turn their homesickness into an artistic drive.
Nostalgia as a Creative Force
I believe this is the key: transforming nostalgia into a creative force that reshapes our personal narratives for the good of our lives and the people we love.
First, I think we need to embrace the panic, and recognize it as a natural part of our narrative stretching itself to account for the new events in our lives. We are changing. Things are not what they were before. And that's ok because this is still a part of the unfolding story.
Next, I think we need to be careful not to treat the emotion as a call to recollect or restore memories just for the sake of it. We can let go. In letting things go, we allow them to take their new place in the narrative naturally.
Most importantly, I think we need to appreciate the fact that while we are feeling nostalgia for things past, we are also actively living in a world that's going to be another object of our future nostalgia. While I'm pining for lost times when I was a child living with my parents, right here and now, I am a husband to my wife, and a father to my daughter. We are making our own memories now, and I'm sure that in a short period of time, I'll find myself yearning for these fleeting moments that we're living in this way together.
And so with this heightened sense of personal narrative, I can be more careful about how I'm living my life and affecting those people I love and care about.
A few years from now, if I am to be struck by nostalgia, I want to see myself as a father who did his best to raise his daughter properly, and to spend as much time with her as possible. If I'm going to be under its sentimental waves, I want to look back and see how much I showed my love for my wife.
That I took care of them both as best I could—just like my parents.
That our home was a happy one—just like my childhood's.
This way, I'm not simply remembering; I'm animating memories by living out the best lessons in the story I’ve made my own. And if life can't help being a collapsing warp bubble of memory, I now know that the goal is not to anchor myself to a lost world, but to the one I'm creating right now.