Is it just me or do childhood memories seem sometimes so distant that they almost don’t belong to you? Sometimes I have this strange experience; it’s almost as if someone else inserted memories into my hippocampus, but I feel detached from them, watching them instead of reliving them, seeing them without remembering their feelings, wondering if they really happened.
Maybe it’s just because I’m getting older, but I’ve begun desiring to reconnect to those memories, or maybe reconnect to the girl in those memories. With curiosity, I sometimes allow myself the luxury of wandering about in those thoughts: Who was I before the grown up world claimed me, before motherhood swept through and took over memory making for a whole family?
I’ve been luxuriating in this mental space a little more this week because of the changing of seasons. There’s something about autumn that has a visceral impact on me. In Autumn, rather than those disjointed memories, I connect to them, feel them in my body. The way the afternoon sun glints through the trees reminds me of playing with my barbies in the shaded gully in our backyard. The blue sky and puffy clouds remind me of swinging on the school play yard, lost in my own imaginary world. The feel and smell in the air remind me of waiting outside in the driveway of my piano teacher's, Mrs Fly’s, house, for my mom to pick me up, listening to the dried leaves scratch across the driveway.
And when the fall breeze hit my skin the other day, I swear to you I felt it deep in the core of me, and it almost hurt. I don’t know how else to describe it… but I think the word for it is nostalgia. That word nostalgia. The word pain is actually in the definition. It’s a pain to return home. It’s interesting to me how so many memories seem so distant, and then one will hit and the inner pain to return to that unreachable place, that once-home, will be almost overwhelming.
Nostalgia is a really complex experience, as I’m sure you know. Do you love it? Do you hate it? Are you sad, are you in pain and longing, or do you feel love and appreciation for the experience that created it? I was recently listening to a sermon by Timothy Keller and he talked about something he referred to as “cosmic nostalgia,” which deeply resonated with me. He put it like this, “in the Bible, the tree of life is an image of immortal eternal life but also an image of irretrievable loss. It’s an image of cosmic nostalgia, a longing for something we remember yet we’ve never had…. Our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in which, in the universe, we now feel cut off from… is no neurotic fantasy, but the truest index of our real situation.” Cosmic nostalgia is missing something that we know, but have never really had. It’s longing to hear a song our hearts remember but have never heard, desiring the arms of someone we love around us but that we’ve never truly felt.
C.S. Lewis alludes to this also in Mere Christianity, “Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world.” There’s definitely something in the experience of nostalgia itself that is a mirage of this indelible pain to return, to go home to something, someone, to have a cosmic experience we’ve been waiting for, to be filled in some very deep way on some very foundational level, within a memory that is there but hasn’t been made yet. C.S. Lewis warns us not to mistake the earthly version for the real thing, but to look at it as a kind of copy or echo of the real thing.
So this season, as the autumn breeze blows by, or as the gentle afternoon sun hits my skin, or the sound of children playing on the playground transports me to simpler days, I’m going to allow myself to feel the nostalgia and breathe a sigh of thanks for the memory, both the one I remember and the one my soul aches to make in eternity.
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