The Good Old Days

Leandro Deitos for openphoto.net

Life is a lot different than it used to be.  It’s recently become apparent to me that I’ve spent the last several years mourning the losses of days gone by—the loss of Minnesota’s lakes and trees, the loss of time with family, the loss of a place where others knew and trusted me, where I felt I fit in, no questions asked.  I’ve expended a lot of energy trying to recreate the past—trying to find local replicas of my long-distance friendships, trying to find fun and fulfillment in the same places as before, trying to be happy, but generally feeling like I’m missing the mark, like a sick baby unavailingly playing with his toys, trying so hard to do the same things he was able to do yesterday, though things aren’t quite the same now as they were then. 

Looking back at my photo albums from my college years has become a bittersweet experience—sweet because I love to look back on the cherished memories, but bitter because I’ve begun to notice a difference in the way I looked then compared to the way I look now.  I instinctively brace myself before opening them up.  I guess it’s because I feel like I looked prettier then, happier, surrounded by friends, wearing bright smiles and bright-colored clothes.

Conversely, life in the present tends to feel dull and faded, both in my physical appearance and in my outlook.  It’s ironic, because that’s how I thought the past was supposed to be—the part that was gray and gone, like flashback scenes in movies and TV shows—and that today was supposed to be the bright, sunny part, full of life and promise. 

There is a passage in Ecclesiastes that warns against looking back on the past with rose-colored glasses.  The passage is a hidden treasure, a few chapters beyond the popular ones about there being a time for every purpose under Heaven and two people being better than one.  It reads, “Do not say, ‘Why were the old days better than these?’  For it is not wise to ask such questions” (7:10, NIV). 

I realize that sitting back and reminiscing about “the good old days” is so common it’s cliché, but it turns out those “good old days” that everyone talks about are actually an illusion.  Don’t get me wrong—we’ve all had good days here and there in earlier times, but to recall entire seasons of our lives as being purely positive is to rewrite the past.  “The good old days” are a false perception, tweaked and manipulated by our optimistic memories.      

With the distance of time, we have some control over what we choose to remember and how we remember it.  I tend to mentally organize and isolate the various events and emotions of my past—with the pleasant stuff being over here and the unpleasant stuff over there, shoved into some dark corner I only intend to visit when I need a testimonial example at a Bible study, or something like that.  I often recall one experience as being purely positive and the other as being purely negative when, in reality, the positive and the negative were mixed together.   The truth is, that a lot of the details I look back upon with tenderness often took place within a less-than-ideal context.  At the time, I didn’t have the luxury of separating everything out.  The vast majority of my days—even in my most fondly-remembered seasons—were a combination of both positive and negative, of both pain and pleasure.  The same days that were dappled with sunshine and sweetness were also shadowed by chaos and confusion.  I had to take the bad with the good, because I didn’t have a choice.  That was life.

And it still is.     

Dictionary.com defines nostalgia as “a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one’s life, to one’s homeland, or to one’s family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time…”  Nostalgia’s not a bad sensation to experience if I let it be just that—a fleeting sensation—but if I’m constantly comparing my arts and crafts version of the past to the wild frontier that is the present, where my ability to edit and control is limited, I’m never going to have an accurate picture of life.  Not of yesterday, nor of today, because I’m holding it to a phantom standard.  Contentment will forever elude me.    

I thought about all of these things earlier this week as I walked through my neighborhood with Alice in her stroller.  Though it may have all sounded so hopeless, I realized one big, encouraging thing about it all, and that was that though those “old days” were no better than these, if hindsight allowed me to see how much good they actually contained, then that also meant that today was filled with plenty of good things as well, hidden as they sometimes may be. 

If my memory’s an optimist, what’s stopping me from being one in the present?  It’s not that I’m pessimistic, but I spend so much of my mental and physical energy trying to turn the cons into pros that I sometimes neglect the existing positives.  I forget to “stop and smell the roses,” as they say. 
So that’s what I chose to do on my walk the other day.  Not literally, of course, because any rosebush in sight was in someone else’s yard, and to cross though their private property to sniff it would’ve been weird.  I focused mainly on the perks of living in Wyoming, which isn’t my “home away from home,” as I’ve been fruitlessly trying to make it, but my home, period. 

Gillette, Wyoming is where I live in an apartment with an outdoor swimming pool, where I get to see youth group from the adult perspective as a volunteer, where I lived when I got my first piece of writing published, where I had my first baby.  If I could make a guess about what kinds of details my bright-side-focused brain will pay special homage to someday, it would be that these were the days when my sister-in-law became one of my best friends, when I lived a mere few hours from Mt. Rushmore and even less from Devil’s Tower and the Big Horn Mountains, when I got to speak at my first youth camp, when my husband allowed me to take a year off from working to write a book. 

And who knows what other kinds of sights and smells and sounds I’m currently overlooking—or maybe even resenting—that I may actually miss later?  Having to go to the library to print and copy documents because we lacked a printer, hearing loud, obnoxious people slamming the iron pool gate late at night, walking down country roads alone with Alice, barefoot because that’s what I used to do growing up in International Falls, when I trained for cross-country on the weekends. 
 
Will I miss the dry, craggy landscape, the sagebrush, or the annoying antelope on the side of the road that can’t decide whether to bolt or stay?  Maybe I’ll even miss the local Walmart.  It seems unlikely, but I wouldn’t be surprised.  I spend enough time there, for heaven’s sake. 

Instead of trying to drag the immovable pieces of my past along with me, why not embrace the present?  Someday down the road, I’ll doubtlessly find myself tempted to look back on these days and think, “I was so much younger and prettier then.  I had so much more energy.  I had so much more time.”  Etc., etc., etc.  So why not feel young and pretty now?  Why not enjoy the time and energy and everything else I’ve been blessed to experience today? 

I think I will.