When visiting your past, treat the experience like you would treat a night at a strip club. Enjoy it, don’t get attached, fight the urge to stay too long, and leave before it gets depressing. I’m sure that, to some extent, we’re all guilty of spending too much time in the past. When life doesn’t go as planned, we tend to look back at times when things were happier, easier, or more fulfilling. You might find yourself daydreaming about old jobs, past relationships, lost youth, or reliving bygone experiences and conversations. And, as they rerun through your brain, they often get stuck on repeat. Eventually your thoughts become a full-blown flea market of “What if I had done this?” or “I should’ve said that.”
“Today, on arguments I have with myself in the shower.”
It’s that time you should’ve stood your ground, but you kept quiet instead. As you watch the replay, you see where you went wrong. Perfect. Stop right there. You went into the past and learned a lesson. Now, quickly get the fuck out of there before you get trapped. This is not the time to think of a witty and devastating comeback. It happened a year ago and you don’t even talk to that person anymore. Remember, the fading waters of the past are for reflection. They’re not for rolling around in like a drunk clown in a mud puddle.
A feeling that often comes with a loss is one of believing that nothing will ever be as good as days gone by. Philosopher Alan Watts referred to it as suffering from nostalgia. Prior to hearing Watt’s lectures, I never viewed nostalgia as a psychological disorder. His mention of this suffering came as a seemingly passive comment, or as if everybody knew that nostalgia was a source of pain. In her book, The Future of Nostalgia, writer and former Harvard professor Svetlana Boym wrote,
“nostalgia appears to be a longing for a place but is actually a yearning for a different time—the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams.”
Boym believed that there are two types of nostalgia, restorative and reflective, each one giving a person different views and feelings about their past. Restorative nostalgia is the sometimes-overwhelming desire to return to and rebuild happier and more comfortable times in our lives. Or, simply put, building a faulty future within our pasts. We become consumed by attempts at reconstructing the familiarity of old memories and experiences. It’s like going on a mental sabbatical from our current, unfulfilled lives. Unfortunately, we soon find that, when we return to our pasts and seek to set up long-term residence, it isn’t tangible. No matter how hard we try, we cannot recreate what has already passed. Our memories are fleeting and flimsy, and our building materials are weakened by rot and decay. As we desperately grasp for the comfort of history, our present selves begin to deteriorate. Neglect and absence have transformed our modernity into a dilapidated shanty. This only adds to our grief and sadness.
The second type of nostalgia, according to Boym, is reflective nostalgia. This is a much healthier approach to reviewing your past. Reflective nostalgia is less about reconstructing periods of your life, in an attempt to escape a lackluster present, and more about finding happiness and gratitude in what you’ve already experienced. Think of it as objectively watching the post-game tapes of your life while noting lessons and points to be appreciative of. Effectively, this is a practice that will help you learn and transform, rather than bogging you down and impeding you from growth.
We all look back upon our pasts and recall memories that make us feel happy, comfortable, at-home, or content. Some people see these as moments to smile about when they pass through their minds. It gives them a feeling of gratitude for it having happened at all. Conversely, for some, these memories can induce a sense of sadness because they can no longer feel or see that act or embodiment in the physical world. When you're trapped in a state of depression, it becomes enormously onerous to see the positive effects and feel the gratitude that these memories are affably extending to you. Your memories become hamster wheels for the depressed brain, holding you in a cycle of lost satisfaction. You feel like those days passed were surely the peak of your life.
The root of your pain lays in occupying too much time on your past. There will always be memories attributed to every emotion, whether joyous, sad, angry, or fearful. The depressed brain digs its heels into the past. You lose the imperative balance between past and present, or present and future and disregard what is happening to you right now, at this moment.
Think of yourself as a tree in the early stages of life. The “past” you is a planted seed. You lay mostly dormant under a safety blanket of soil. You’ve successfully dropped from your parent tree and embedded yourself away from the elements, hungry birds, and trampling animals. You have no challenges or tasks but to sit patiently, absorb the surrounding water and nutrients while you wait to sprout. Your “past” mind is no different. It needs no tending, but only a caring look-see every now and then to learn about growth.
As you navigate your way through depression or even just a passing bout of nostalgia , try to understand that your past, although written in permanent marker, will still fade with time. Decipher it while you can, absorb valuable teachings, and discard it when it becomes irrelevant and illegible. And if you happen to run into Doc Brown, with his plans for a 1.21-Gigawatt Flux Capacitor, time-traveling, shit-mobile, be sure to tell him that you’re all good with where you’re at right now.