Nostalgia

In recalling past events, I seem to remember an atmosphere that I was unaware of at the time of the event.

When given free play, my memory will paint a picture of brightly colored tulips that had pushed their way through the moist ground of early spring. Or I will recall the high pitched voices of children sweetly singing at a grade school Christmas concert. Or I can almost hear again the sharp crack of an ax as it split a log on a crisp autumn day.

At such times, a longing to return to the place where I was raised would seize me. I suddenly wanted to relive those experiences and revisit those places that now evoked such feelings of nostalgic wistfulness within me.

I am aware, however, that I often wear rose-tinted glasses when reviewing my past. I realized that if I could travel back in time, I would not feel any special thing. I would have little appreciation for the "mad dance of life" that was unfolding around me and that I would later so fondly recall.

Daniel Gilbert, in Stumbling on Happiness, points out that "Experiences are like movies with several added dimensions, and were our brains to store the full-length feature films of our lives rather than their tidy descriptions, our heads would need to be several times larger. And when we wanted to know or tell others whether the tour of the sculpture garden was worth the price of the ticket, we would have to replay the entire episode to find out. Every act of memory would require precisely the amount of time that the event being remembered had originally taken, which would permanently sideline us the first time someone asked if we liked growing up in Chicago."

In other words, memory is a greatly compressed version of what actually happened with the editor freely choosing to include some details and to leave others out. When we recall an event, memory weaves a recognizable portrait that is more a fictionalized account than an actual experience.

Although my memory did record the brightly colored tulips, the angelic voices of the children singing, and the sharp crack of the ax, it failed when reconstructing the past to include that I was also worried about finding a job on that spring day, or that I was nervous about singing on stage in front of a large audience of parents and teachers, or that I was exhausted from swinging the ax on that autumn day in the woods.

You can prove to yourself how unreliable our memories of the past are and you do not need to be a time-traveler to do so. After all, the laws of physics that were in effect then are the same laws that are in effect now. Perhaps in our current circumstances, it is red roses instead of brightly-colored tulips, the Red Hot Chile Peppers instead of children singing, and the crack of a bat as the ball sails toward the fences instead of an ax.

Are you aware that the phenomenon of life is occurring now? Or are you sleepwalking through the event and only become aware that you were slumbering when the experience is already past?

Thoreau said that "To be awake is to be alive." It may be true for most people that the worst revelation at death is that they never really lived--that they were only dreaming--and that to die is to awaken from a nightmare.