The Quiescence of Nostalgia, and How We’ll Stay Turned On.

We need to travel. If we don’t offer ourselves to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder. Our eyes don’t lift to the horizon; our ears don’t hear the sounds around us. The edge is off our experience, and we pass our days in a routine that is both comfortable and limiting. We wake up one day and find we have lost our dreams in order to protect our days. Don’t let yourself become one of these people. The fear of the unknown and the lure of the comfortable will conspire to keep you from taking the chances the traveler has to take. But if you take them, you will never regret your choice. To be sure, there will be moments of doubt when you stand alone on an empty road in an icy rain, or when you are ill with fever in a rented bed. But as the pains of the moment will come, so too will they fall away. In the end, you will be so much richer, so much stronger, so much clearer, so much happier, and so much better a person that all the risk and hardship will seem like nothing compared to the knowledge you have gained.

Kent Nerburn, Letters to My Son (with thanks to Kerri Gosselin for giving this to me)

We’ve been back in the USA for about a week now. Our bodies, suffering from jetlag, are confused, clinging to that place we left and loved. With each passing day, I feel this experience slipping away from me.

We’re experiencing classic readjustment stuff, but it brings up some important questions: Why do we feel this draw for the unknown, the world outside of our comfort zone? And what happens when we come back?

Sometimes it turns out that the latter is more difficult to answer than the former. Or at least, has its own challenges that are surprisingly hard. We want to hold onto something beautiful and wonderful; we try and relive those moments. We get all Summer of ’69 and say things like, “those were the best days of my life.”

No matter how tempting or comforting this emotion is, I think this kind of nostalgia can be limiting for a number of reasons. First, and most obviously, this is troublesome for enjoying and experiencing the moment or place you’re currently in. You end up going through the motions with your head and heart elsewhere.

Second, and perhaps more important, this kind of nostalgia ends up changing and replacing the experience itself. Your desire for memories becomes stronger than the actual experience. The problems and difficulties you encountered and the negative aspects of the experience were important elements. Without them, you would not have learned anything. But with nostalgia, we often gloss over these moments to only think about how perfect things were then, and we reconstruct a falsely utopic location that exists only in our minds.

Nostalgia, in the end, is a paralyzing emotion. It’s rarely an emotion of action. And I’m not saying we should do without it– this is impossible and unwise. Our memories make us who we are.

But I am saying that a wallowing in nostalgia is a very dangerous thing.  (Think of the idea of “glory days”– often applied to high school. Ack. If the best days of your life were in high school, you’ve obviously glossed over superficiality, braces and bad kissing.)

Instead, we need to take those moments when we felt we were truly alive and figure out how to channel them into action in the more ordinary times in our lives. When Corey and I lived in Sevilla, we knew we were experiencing something incredible, so our senses were tuned in to every detail. We observed and experienced new ways of living and viewing the world.

Now we need to not turn off. And this will be hard, and might involve some change to how we were living before. We’ll need to pay attention to the details, slow down a bit. While I’m not saying the sublime is lurking on your errand run to the RMV, it might not be far, perhaps waiting for you on your way home, as you drive down a country road buzzing with summer, or hear the voice of a talented street performer singing in the subway.

I grew up in a quiet, simple place and developed an incurable wanderlust. But in the end, I feel similar emotions when I look back on summer in Lititz, PA and summer in Nelson, New Zealand and summer in Cadiz, Spain. Could it be that it’s not so much the place, as it is how we lived there? Perhaps what we are bringing home from southern Spain is not a longing to return (which we have, no doubt) but a clearer head, a new way of looking at the world, a habit of being truly alive. We can look back. But we also need to keep living.