The paradox of nostalgia

And a quick video update :)

Last week, I had a conversation with a stranger that got me thinking about nostalgia and why it’s so weirdly painful. 

During a relentless heat wave, I took my toddler to the pool for the day. As he swam up and said hi to a woman relaxing near us, I did that mom thing where you tell your kid, “Hey, buddy, she might need some space,” while secretly hoping that person is cool with little kids. “Oh, he’s fine!” the stranger said. We got to talking. She had two teenagers, but she loved being around toddlers, she said, because she missed that stage so much. “These are the best years,” she told me, “so enjoy every moment.”

My heart dropped. “Enjoy every moment” is at the top of my to-do list, and most days, I feel like I’m failing. 

I’m so worried that life will go by too fast and I’ll forget all of it. I’ll forget the way my kid laughs. The way his big toe sticks out. Or the time he told the cat to “make better choices” when she scratched up the rug. The truth is, I’ve already forgotten so much. My husband will remind me of something that happened a few months ago, or a friend will say, “Hey, remember when…” and I have no idea what they’re talking about. I’m a little embarrassed to admit: I keep a spreadsheet to track the important moments in my day lest they slip away from me. My phone is so full of photos, so many attempts to enjoy the moment, that I had to buy more storage from Google. Sometimes I’ll look at the spreadsheet or I’ll look at the photos on my phone and I’ll think, “Damn, I don’t even remember that.”

New parents hear this a lot  — enjoy every moment!  — and it can be hard to hear because it feels like yet another piece of advice you didn’t ask for. But it’s not unsolicited advice, it’s nostalgia. When people tell you to “enjoy every moment,” I think what they’re really trying to say is, “I miss that part of my own life. I wish I could experience it again.”  It’s a little heartbreaking, but that’s the nature of nostalgia. 

There’s something more unsettling about this pattern, though—about desperately trying to latch onto present moments that will later become nostalgia. Is it even possible to do that? Is it possible to enjoy a memory before it becomes a memory? By definition, nostalgia looks to the past. We can savor small moments, sure (I did at the pool that day) but it’s impossible to appreciate them in the same way we will in the future. 

I guess what I’m trying to say is that nostalgia is unavoidable. When I miss certain experiences from my past, I wish I could go back and revisit those experiences. I can’t, so I urge myself to enjoy every moment NOW so I won’t feel the pain of nostalgia later. But this isn’t how it works, is it? The nature of existence is that all things must pass, and the paradox of nostalgia is that the more we appreciate those things, the more the memory of them hurts. Trying to enjoy my way out of the pain of nostalgia is a fool’s errand.

Despite all of this, someday I will be that woman at the pool. I’ll see a mom teaching her kid to swim. She’ll smile at me and I’ll tell her it all goes by so fast, that she should enjoy every moment. And she’ll think, “Geez, lady, I'm doing my best. Mind your own business.” But it won’t be personal. It’ll be my own small, perhaps unconscious attempt to find a way back to that place myself. An attempt to avoid the pain of nostalgia and the price of a memory: that you can’t relive it once it’s gone.

Maybe the best you can do is a spreadsheet.

-Kristin

Untranslatable

Related words…

• Suadade (Portuguese): The pleasure of longing for something that’s gone

• Hireath (Welsh): A longing for a time, place or person that may not exist

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From the archives

How to Handle Being Homesick as an Adult (Lifehacker)

This week’s soundtrack