Nostalgia - You Are What You Were When and What You Choose to Be Now

I just got an email that has cute pictures and in poetic form tells all the things they miss about the nineteen-fifties, then asks me to send it to someone else who'd appreciate the memories.

I realized in reading it, I don't like those memories.

Those cliche' views leave out that women were relegated to staying home or could only get secretarial, teaching or nursing jobs, and African Americans had to sit in the back, couldn't eat in most restaurants, and feared being lynched. One couldn't marry someone of the same sex let alone show them affection. Education wasn't valued, men knew best, white people were all powerful and the United States was proud it dropped nuclear bombs. And, pedophilia, depression and anything else mental was seen as a personal fault not an illness.

I get the idea that we are who we were when, but I would relate to nostalgia better if it acknowledged the "and then... this evolved into that." I'd appreciate it if it noted that in time, change doesn't stop. Are they still wearing saddle shoes and wearing a pageboy or duck's ass? I mean everything they listed as contemporary will be just as old and past in twenty years anyway. I don't really like revering a time unless you can learn from it. We may rail against things not made as well now, but I'd rather have a cataract removed now than then... An hour in a chair in out patient suite vs three days in sand bags in a hospital... give me the good ole days... NOT.

I don't like nostalgia. Personally, I have no interest in making any of those times anything more than that... a place in time. I'd rather use my energy to make peace with today... to embrace all the things that have changed and live with integrity among them, to bring myself to understand the present, maybe try to make it better from the lessons that I learned from when I grew up. I'm so dismayed at seeing the fundamentalism that's trying to turn back time like in Indiana and around the world.

I still don't get why I feel different now that I am 60 from when I was 40. Ha! Sure, I can't get pregnant but I still have my whole life ahead of me to birth new things. I have to remind myself that it's okay to start things... even a business. I just may need a sooner than later succession plan. Thank goodness there's an app for that... probably.

There are years ahead. My watercolor painting reminds me daily that if I am at all normal, then I'll look back on the junk I'm doing now as the time I had to put in to get to where I will be then. My brother just bought something that requires classes and learning to be safe and to get good at it. That's inspiring. It's good to start something new. When my friends retired they picked up and moved to France. They started over... even language. That's more and more inspiring the closer I get to that time.

I find myself placing meaning on retirement that means shut down; that makes it seem to coincide with diminishment, but I don't know if or how that's going to happen... There's no sense in acting like it is inevitable or it's total incapacitation.

So, I’ve beat to death the idea that I really don't like nostalgia. The reality is, I do like to tell stories. So, my learning today is that I don’t want to be nostalgic for the sake of remembering. I want to remember so that the present and the future is worth remembering.