Nostalgia and Occasionally "Dwelling on the Past"

There are people who tend to live in the past, and there are people who just love nostalgia. I, on the other hand, are a look-to-the-future kind of person. That's why last Winter, when I went through a few months of unsettling dwelling on the past, I was actually getting a little concerned about my own mental health. Most people understand that a little nostalgia may be fine, but too much is often seen as a sign of a problem.

Being a little more than half-way through my life, I'm not of an age where I should be entering any "second childhood". Neither am I of an age where thinking about details of my childhood should really be taking up too much of my thinking time. Still, last Winter I found myself with an uncharacteristic preoccupation with inconsequential details of my childhood. Equally unsettling, I found myself longing to go back to the city where I'd spent my childhood and see what was still the same. I should have gone, and maybe that longing would have ended. I didn't go, so it persisted for a good part of the Winter.

When you're a practical, look-to-the-future, kind of person finding yourself preoccupied with the details of a childhood that was decades ago can make you wonder what's going on. I actually considered that this could be the very beginnings of some sort of premature (very premature) mental deterioration; so not only was I preoccupied with the baffling preoccupation with the past, but also with the concerns that what was going on was not a harmless phase.

It turns out, though, that this wasn't just a pointless phase (or a sign of looming mental illness). It was - now that I've figured it out - a function of that very practical and sensible part of my personality from which I've always gained my sense of stability. I've also figured out that some of the apparent "dwelling on the past" and talking about the past that elderly people often do may, in fact, also be a far more practical and healthy thing than many younger people realize.

My own four-month nostalgia binge began when I thought about the car my father had when I was three years old. This led to my thinking about the car my cousin's father had then, which led me to look online for a picture of an old car like my cousin's father's car in order to identify it's year. Not long after that, I found myself trying to recall every house in which every extended family member lived when I was a kid and every school every cousin attended (and when they attended). Then there was the evening I sat and wrote a list of every teacher I had ever had in all my years of school, which led to trying to remember as many of my sister's teacher's names as well. Also during this period of dwelling in the past, I found myself trying to remember the names of my sister's friends and their sisters. On another evening of deep thought I tried to remember all my classmates, and where he sat, from first grade through sixth grade.

My son showed me the site where satellite photos online show any neighborhood, so I had a whole evening of staring at the roof of my childhood home, my friends' homes, and the neighborhood in general. Of course, this led to my looking for the old neighborhoods of all my dead relatives. I did get to have a virtual visit to my grandfather's country house on the pond and be reassured that office condos had not been built on the lane on which he once lived. I'd been kind of imagining all that country land's being sold for commercial purposes.

As I followed my route to work each day I found myself looking for houses that were of a similar style to my childhood home, and I'd find myself imagining them in a different color or with certain windows in different places. ("If that were there, and this were this color, it would be like seeing my childhood home," I thought.) There was a time I actually e.mailed one of my few remaining cousins to ask her to fill in some blanks for me with regard to things we shared as children. Another time I looked up online the hospital in which my mother, who had a lung problem, stayed for quite a while. I downloaded pictures of the buildings and tried to put myself back on the lawn of the hospital, where I'd look up and see my mother in the window. I went through trying to recall the names of people who worked with my father, the names of his army buddies from World War II, the names of people my mother knew, the names of cousins' cousins and pets, and on and on. It wasn't that I did nothing but try to remember all these details of my childhood. I was living my present-day life, so I wasn't completely out of touch with reality. It was more that I was having my weeks interrupted with some of these seemingly useless memory exercises for no reason that I could figure or see as having any purpose. I wondered if maybe it wasn't a mental health problem but more of a bizarre little addiction problem I'd developed - the way people get addicted to the challenges of video games.

After about four months of this "condition" and after it seemed as if I'd completely brushed up on the details that, based on some of the trouble I had recalling some of them, had clearly begun to fade; my preoccupation with the past seemed to end as quickly as it had come on. After I noticed that a few weeks had passed without my taking time out of my evening to list details from my past (either in my mind or on paper) I had the time to try to figure out why I had had my "Winter of useless dwelling in the past."

It occurred to me that when we're in our twenties our childhood is so fresh the memories of it are just there. We don't have to work to dig them up. The person of twenty or twenty five doesn't have to go all that far back to stay in touch with his beginnings. Looking back over the last twenty years for the middle-aged person seems like looking back five years. People in their thirties aren't all that far away from their childhoods either, and people that age are often extremely busy with work and family life. My theory is that it may be in our thirties when we lose a little touch with our beginnings, and that could be the decade when our memories of all those seemingly insignificant details of our childhood begin to get a little "dusty". Still, people in their thirties can probably, if they try, fairly easily dig out those insignificant memories if they want/need to.

Once we reach our forties, though, we've got at least four decades behind us, as well as four decades of more recent memories that have moved into our minds and pushed those older ones way to the back of my minds. Our children are often old enough to have well established lives of their own, even if they're still in school. Older children bring more complex things for parents to think about, so people in their forties don't just have their own four decades-plus of memories and life, but their minds may also be occupied by what's going on in the lives of each of their children. While the thirties may be the first decade where the childhood memories begin to get pushed to the back of our mind, the forties may be the decade when the fullness of a mature life rushes in and almost flushes out those insignificant details like the name of the people who lived three houses up when we were four years old.

I realized that my few months of apparent preoccupation with the silliest little details of my childhood were nothing more than a way to reach way into the back of my mind, bring out the dusty and most insignificant memories of my childhood, see whether they remained in good condition, and freshen those memories by (in computer terms) copying them and clicking on "save as".

What triggered this process of seeking out the seemingly most insignificant details from my childhood is something of which I'm not sure. I don't know if it was a conscious or subconcious awareness that those memories had begun to fade. I don't know if we reach a point in life or a level of stress that may trigger an urge to "copy" those old memories, so they'll be fresh again. There's a chance, I suppose, that our brains or minds may have some kind of "Maintenance Wizard" built into them and do something like scan for dusty memories. What I do know, though, is that the roots of this phase I experienced were not in any longing for the past or any other emotional factors. My memory exercises were clearly nothing more than an intellectual exercise, regardless of what triggered those exercises.

What I realized is that there are people (like me) who see too much time spent thinking about the past as a possible sign of either mental illness or at least emotional problems/longings when, really, those few months I had of recurring memory exercises were nothing more than my brain's or mind's attempt to make sure I got to keep the memories that had begun to fade. Even as I tried to objectively assess why someone as young as I am would go through this apparent nostalgia phase, I kept trying to ask myself if there was some emotional problem I was having (and I kept answering myself with, "No, I'm fine - except for this memory-brushing-up thing.")

This was the first time in my life when I've been hit with a "nostalgia bout", so it was new to me. Now that I've realized it seemed to be nothing more than a way to brush up the oldest and smallest memories in order not to lose them for the second half (or third) of my life, I'm assuming that in the decades to come I may go through similar phases again - and that is the lesson to be learned here.

So often we tend to assume that when older people seem very nostalgic its a sign of the loneliness of old age or a longing for the past. Because my nostalgia phase was my first, and because I was a little concerned about it, I kept it to myself. Now that I've figured out it was nothing more than memory-dusting and copying, and now that I've analyzed the whole situation and realized it wasn't the beginning of some mental illness or else some pathetic longing for the past, if it happens again I probably won't worry about sharing it with others.

I've realized that when we're young or sort of young we just do not understand nostalgia. A little is fine, we think, but more than a little is a sign of a problem. I've come to believe that the bout of nostalgia I had was as natural and purposeful as a young woman's first menstrual cycle. Like a menstrual cycle, it did bring with it some associated feelings and thoughts; and like a menstrual cycle, the nostalgia thing may turn out to be something that shows up again and again. What I think I learned, though, is that those of us in the first half of our lives (or just wrapping it up) need to remember that while we cannot understand some of the nostalgia ("living in the past") that we observe in older people, we can at least realize that we don't understand it. Remembering to refrain from "diagnosing" older people who appear to be dwelling on the past may be the most respectful thing we can do. After all, what can seem to us as a negative consequence of age may actually be a sign of how well the human mind is really designed.

My Winter of dwelling on the past ended, and as Spring came I no longer sought out those Victorian houses. Confident in the clarity of my memories, I was ready to return to looking to the future.