Proactive nostalgia
One summer afternoon, I drove past a park during Little League season. Each field was alive with kids in their ball caps and uniforms, parents cheering from the stands, and siblings racing around the bleachers. It was a picturesque scene of pure, unadulterated life. It was carefree, blissful wonderment. It was the Fourth of July scene in The Sandlot.
It was also just another Wednesday afternoon where I was driving home from picking up my daughters from daycare, after a long, stressful day at work.
In the car, with two toddlers going back and forth between fighting over a toy phone and laughing at each other's silly faces, I caught myself contemplating life’s multidimensionality. In one dimension I was stress-spiraling, trying to calculate how I would manage family dinner, playtime, and bedtime while also sneaking into several work emails, and then finishing a project after everyone went to bed, without going to sleep too late myself to not be more exhausted than usual the following day. In short, it was just another day.
But just for a moment in the car, the heavy, frenetic anxiety I had been carry all day went away and was replaced with nostalgia. I smiled.
I grew up playing baseball with my family in the stands, going out to pizza with the team after the game. Throwing against the pitch back in the backyard for hours on end trying to perfect my curve ball. They were without a doubt the good old days. There was not a care in the world aside from getting the chance to play a game with my friends.
And then I really thought about it. Even at a young age, I had just as much anxiety as I do today. And very much the same anxiety. I remember one moment in particular, stranding on the pitcher's mound after striking out my first two batters. Six pitches, six strikes, two outs. My parents and team were clapping. It was a core memory in the making. But I remember in the very moment being overcome by anxiety. I felt my first bout of imposter syndrome, right at the moment I was literally striking people out. I remember no longer seeing the moment as an 8-year-old throwing a baseball to see if another 8-year-old hit it within the bounds of a game with arbitrary rules that someone made up at one point. I remember feeling expectations for the first time. I wasn’t thrilled about striking two people out. I was terrified I wasn’t going to strike out a third. Now, everyone must be expecting me to strike out a third, expecting me to throw a perfect game, expecting to carry me on their shoulders chanting my name, and telling stories to their neighbors about how they knew me when I played Little League and look, now I’m a famous ball player. At 8, standing on the mound, I was everywhere but in the moment. I had everything I needed, more than I needed, in that moment to truly savor the joy of life. But instead, I felt dread.
That’s not me I thought, while I stood on the mound looking toward my third batter. I can’t do all those things people are expecting of me. I’m going to let them all down. They’ll realize I just got lucky the first two batters and everyone got excited for nothing about maybe seeing something special. I went on to walk the next two batters. And honestly, I can remember what happened after that. Nothing noteworthy for better or worse. But I do know it doesn’t matter now and it didn’t matter at the time. I went on to play baseball for many more years. I struck out a lot more batters, walked a lot more batters, threw a couple of one-hitters, and made and missed hundreds of plays.
Today, I look back on the aggregate of that time as some of the best years of my life. Yet at the time, in the moment, I couldn’t imagine anything more stressful.
Nostalgia is a curious thing. It’s the affection and longing for a past time. These times you look back on with nostalgia we’re just as complex and fraught with challenges and anxiety as your present and future experiences. But nostalgia has a framing power that the present perspective lacks. Nostalgia has a way of highlighting the good and trimming away the bad, allowing us to remember the good times as just that–good times. Life's biggest tragedy is that we often only recognize the good times in retrospect, and rarely in the moment they are happening. But every moment, day, and era of life, comes complete with all the necessary ingredients to be nostalgia-worthy and therefore worthy of being recognized as good in the moment. What if we could get to the point where we were able to put the nostalgia filter on our present and future moments? We would get to truly appreciate the activities we get and have to do. We would focus on what matters and is meaningful and turn down the volume on the things that don’t. The catch is, the things that matter and are meaningful are usually one and the same as the things that are anxiety-inducing. It is just perspective. The nostalgia filter doesn't cut out the bad parts, it casts them in a different light, one that helps us see the value of them.
We are all still in our own version of a Little League baseball game. In years, we will look back on the time we are in right now as another era of the good years. By changing our perspective we don’t have to let ourselves surrender these years to nostalgia, but get the joy of living them right now.
If we can adjust our perspective, we don’t have to wait for nostalgia to show us the beauty of now. By focusing on what matters, we can savor these moments as they unfold. The nostalgia filter doesn’t erase the hard parts; it casts them in a different light. It helps us see their value.
Years from now, we’ll look back on this time with affection. But let’s not wait. These are the good old days — we just need to recognize them.
I wish I had a clear answer as to how, but that is what this journey is about, and I imagine we never fully arrive at our destination. And the goal is to appreciate that and look at the journey with affection.
But simply knowing that today is just another day we get the privilege of putting on your Little League uniform in whatever form that looks like and stepping out on whatever mound the day gives us, we have everything available to us from our internal resources and external world to create nostalgia-worthy experiences. And because of that we should breathe in the air of the moment, cherish the perspiration of effort, and smile at both or strikeouts and walks.
