The nostalgia trap and how it comes in the way of adulting

More than twenty years back, I went for a silent meditation retreat. I remember on one of the days as I was walking towards the meditation room, I felt the rustling of the leaves and found myself surrounded by a silence which felt healing, and I experienced it as a peak experience. That moment is still etched in my head and over the years I have used my memory of that experience as a yardstick for seeing if other experiences meet that expectation. This sense of nostalgia and its impact on our mind has fascinated me for years. Early on it felt like an emotion that can fill me with feelings of warmth, aliveness as I think about the past. In fact, the Merriam Webster dictionary describes it as ‘a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.’ As I have grown older, I have begun to see nostalgia as a bittersweet emotion which is capable of infusing energy and vigour by evoking pleasant fulfilling experiences from our past and at other times capable of taking us down a slippery slope where we begin to crave for life, relationships we had and almost a yearning which can feel like grief if not managed well. That’s when I started researching and found that the term nostalgia comes from the Greek word algos which basically refers to grief, pain and then nostos which means return to the native land or homecoming. This term was coined by University of Basel scholar Johannes Hofer in 1668. For the longest time, it was used to describe a medical condition that was seen in Swiss mercenaries abroad and it involved home sickness, a pronounced longing for their home showing up in the form of deep sadness and distress. Over the years, the lens of seeing it as a medical condition started fading away and we had a newer understanding shaped by how we romanticize it in books, art, music and poetry.
There are lot of scenarios where our capacity for dipping into nostalgia can serve a purpose and even prove to be anchoring. In therapy when clients find themselves struggling with difficult scenarios, or experience hopelessness and helplessness I often ask them to think back to a time in the past where they experienced something similar. Often, clients can bring memories from incidents, life situations where they found hope, courage and even an ability to experience beauty in difficult dark times. In those moments nostalgia can serve as a propelling force that allows us to think about our present and future with a conviction that we can trust ourselves and what life has to offer. It allows us to experience grounded optimism even though in the present moment, it’s hard to feel hopeful. Think about experiences where we are catching up with an old friend and are reminiscing about school or college days and we may find ourselves filled with a sense of renewed vitality, happiness and even gratitude.
However, this may not be true for everyone and in these moments sometimes nostalgia can come in the way of our wellbeing and keep us feeling stuck. I remember a forty-year-old client telling me about how she thinks her school years were the best years of her life and how that makes her present-day life feel inadequate. Nostalgia, in her case, ended up making her feel unhappy and trapped in a spiral of what ifs.
In the book, ‘Why we remember: The Science of Memory and How It Shapes Us’, Dr Charan Rangnath, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at University of California, says, “The cost of nostalgia is that it can leave us feeling disconnected from our lives in the present, giving us a sense that things aren’t as they were in the ‘good old days’.”
So, the trick really lies in becoming mindful of what nostalgia evokes in us and becoming aware of its impact on us. Learning to recognize when nostalgia serves a purpose and when it leaves us stuck is perhaps key to adulting.