The summers were longer when I was younger. The air was cleaner, food tasted better, people were friendlier and the streets were safer.
Children respected their elders, and it really did take a village.
It was a more innocent time, a time when our heroes were exemplary role models of good behaviour and our culture was a source of pride. At least that’s how I remember it.
And it’s probably how I’ll always remember it, even though the reality might have been very different. The problem with memory is that it’s unreliable.
How we experience the world is influenced by a combination of factors that are constantly changing, some of which we may not even be aware of, and so the way we remember things will always reflect that.
This kind of hagiographic tendency is strong in all of us as we constantly look back on a soft-focus past with rose-tinted shades firmly in place.
Nostalgia, that yearning for an irretrievable past, forces even those of us with past personal histories that would fit right into a Cormac McCarthy novel to add a healthy dollop of sentiment to our past recollections.
The topics are universal – reminiscences about friends and family members, holidays, weddings, songs, sunsets, lakes.
The stories tend to feature the self as the protagonist surrounded by close friends.
Perhaps it says something about the human condition, that we can’t be happy in our present and have to retrofit positive feelings into our past so our current worry or misery is always compared to a time we may or may not imagine to be better somehow.
While it’s a habit popular culture has attributed to an older generation ( the ‘back in my day’ phenomenon), its something we’re constantly doing throughout our lives.
Maybe it’s as simple as trying to remember the good and forget the bad (which has a good deal of truth in it). Nostalgia is a bittersweet emotion, but the net effect is to make life seem more meaningful. When we speak wistfully of the past, we typically become more optimistic and inspired about the future.
But there’s more to it than that. A big part of why we glorify the past could just be deep-seated fear of change.
The up side of living in dynamic times is that it’s exciting to see the world transform in a short enough time span to be noticeable. The down side is that it’s scary.
We don’t know where it’s going to end, and we’re worried we might mess it all up. The truth is we very well might. And so we look back to a time of certainty and safety, and what’s more certain than that which has already happened?
But the system is in motion, and we’re all a part of it, and it’s in a state of flux, regardless of our feelings on the matter.
Perhaps the best we can do in the face of so much uncertainty is to hold on and try to enjoy the ride.
