Author’s note: This a short piece written for the Soaring Twenties Social Club Symposium. Every month a roving band of flâneurs, artists, writers and layabouts create something around a set theme. For June, the theme was nostalgia.
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Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his lot. Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil—this is the gift of God. For he will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart.
The Preacher, Ecclesiastes 5:18-19
We went on holiday earlier this year, to Aviemore in the Scottish Highlands. A beautiful part of the country, but also a few miles south of Inverness, where my wife and I honeymooned nearly seven years ago now. We hadn’t been back in the area since then and I thought it was time to take a trip down memory lane.
So I planned to take a day, leave the girls with grandparents and travel up to our honeymoon city. We’d go round a few of the places we visited, have lunch and dinner in two of the restaurants we remembered and relive the glory days, childfree.
Well, it didn’t work out and we ended up with two young girls in tow. The plans changed. I wasn’t going to get my perfect reenactment of one of the happiest times in my life. It was a sad day. But that day found us in the end eating at the Mustard Seed Café in Inverness, one of the more memorable places that we’d been to all those years ago. What had been a romantic spot for two was now a chaotic one for four. The same warm yellow tones radiated from the walls, the same rich wooden floor gleamed beneath our feet, the same glitzy mirrors and random decorative trains towered behind the bar. It was all the same as it had been six and a half years before. But we weren’t.
One daughter was sound asleep in the buggy, the other was upset because she couldn’t understand why the trains weren’t toys for her to play with. My wife and I were linked with the solid and settled fire of old love, instead of the fresh flush of the new. Less flashy perhaps, but a lot more true. It was all wrong for my nostalgic dream. It was all right for where I was right now.
I sat in that familiar place and I realised what I’d got wrong. Life had moved on. I wanted to go back, just for a day, but I realised I can’t. I can never go back, no one can ever go back.
And that’s okay. I wouldn’t go back for the whole world. This life, the one I’m in right now? It’s better.
Perhaps, I was more happy then. But I am more joyful now.
Which is where we circle back to that header quote.
No book has challenged or shaped me more than the book of Ecclesiastes. Written by the anonymous Preacher, Ecclesiastes is an extended meditation on what it means to be mortal, to strut our brief time on the stage and exit in a few short years. To be here and then gone. To be a “whisper spoken in the wind: here one minute, and carried away forever the next” (Gibson, Living Life Backwards).
It’s a book that reads like the writings of a world-weary wanderer, a cynic who has seen and done it all. Yet the man who wrote it is joyful, not jaded, underneath his weary realism. And he has deep wisdom to offer.
As I thought about my misguided nostalgia, I remembered those words from the Preacher we opened with.
For he will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart.
Looking back is no bad thing. We are a collection of all the experiences that have shaped us, and remembering those days with joy is good. Seeing how the threads weaved together to make us what we are.
But nostalgia is something else. Nostalgia is a lack of joy in what we have.
Nostalgia is running from the present, to the past. It’s looking back at better times, instead of taking joy in the here and now. In this precious moment God has given us. It’s a perennial flaw in the human condition. We are curious creatures, obsessed with the future and the past. We spend all our lives wanting to get to a specific moment in the future, a marriage, a family, a job, a career, a house. Whatever. There’s always something we’re chasing and when we get there we want to go back. We bleed ourselves out to get to the future and it tints our spectacles rose when we look back.
And the thing is it was never as good as we remember. Objectivity in the rear view mirror is not as close as it seems.
Ecclesiastes gives us perspective, and a better way. The preacher says no to this hopeless striving. All of it is hebel. Mist. Breath. Vapour. Life is like smoke. You can see it, and enjoy it, but if you try and grasp at it, it slips away. Your hands close on nothing. To be carried away with nostalgia seems to be to live in the opposite error to the careerist. But both are two sides of the same tarnished coin. Both live in a moment that is not now, so both fail to live the life they have. Either stretching for something more in the future, or straining to see what was lost in the past. Both are emptiness, a chasing after wind and a grasping of smoke.
Instead of dreaming about the days we had no toil, we should rejoice in it. Take enjoyment in the moment you are given. Enjoy the work you are doing now. Enjoy the food you are eating now. Enjoy the family you have now.
Live your life as a gift, because all you are given is the present.