Our history tells us of strong men and women who grew old before their time. Individuals forced through the rigors of war, poverty, hardship, and crime to bear the knowledge of pain, loss, regret, and fear.
How strange it is, then, when we – who are young by all accounts except our own – have nostalgia. We look back upon “the good old days” of a time less than four years ago. Many things have certainly changed, but it is not the same as age.
Are we forced to carry burdens today that we didn’t before? Do we know more of the depth of pain, hardships, and rigors of life? Are these questions even answerable?
Was “the greatest generation’s” trials of economy and war comparable with our trials of college and career? Do the furnace fires of self-definition burn with a different source but produce the same tempering of temperament, self-knowledge, and experience?
Did it take strife to forge a complete person in the last century to what academic rigor forms today?
Or, somehow more likely, have we grown soft? We are separated from the deepest of difficulties that touch at the point between ideals and the attainment of those ideals.
I wonder if we are too comfortable. Or perhaps merely our confidence has turned into complacency.
When we have nostalgia today, is it but a glorified form of vanity at our past selves? Can we have even have nostalgia before we are old? Ought we to?
The answer, I believe, is that we should keep our cherished memories, the places and friends that defined us … but to sit in them like a nostalgia of a life well lived is ultimately problematic.
In fact, I can’t ever quite think of an age that ought to be completely devoted to the reliving of past memories.
Living requires presence.