6 ▫️ the place we ache to go

Hello all!

I can’t believe it’s been almost a month since my last post. I’ve been meaning to get here, but as with us all, life happens...so while it’s happening, I’ll post this little blurb I wrote some time ago. 

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It was a Wednesday. I hadn’t been inland for a while, and I had finally found both an excuse and a day to drive over the hills to Ukiah and get some sunshine. 

The way home takes me along one of my favorite stretches on Highway 1, and on this day, it happened to be right after sunset. Just south of the town of Point Arena, there is a hill with a couple of curves that lead away from the city limits. At the crest of the hill, the speed limit goes back up to 55, and the road opens up. In daylight, you will see pasture land and, sometimes, white cows on the left, and the Pacific Ocean on your right. At night, it is almost completely dark. With a full moon, though, the light reflects serenely on both pavement and water, as if showing you two roads: the highway ahead, concrete under your tires; and the ephemeral path, glimmering over the ocean, as though you could take it and reach the horizon between earth and stars. 

As much as I love that, there was no full moon that Wednesday, so the only light came from my headlights. And as I saw my headlights reflecting on the double yellow line, I was struck with a wave of nostalgia. Without warning, my mind took me back to the winter of 2011/12. Ashton and I still lived in Ukiah, and we were spending a lot of time on this part of the coast. It was a time in our lives when we were happy, and we were moving in the same direction, eagerly looking ahead to what we were sure was a bright future. We drove that stretch of highway too many times to count, often in darkness, and each trip either brought us to our friends on the coast, or back home. Either way, our car was filled with conversation so animated that we had to work to stop interrupting each other. 

Woody Allen turns his lens on the subject of nostalgia in his film Midnight in Paris. The main character, Gil, is a neurotic Hollywood screenwriter trying to write his first serious novel. He meets Adriana, a carefree Parisian socialite floating in circles of famous authors and artists. They find common ground in their love of nostalgia; each one wishes to live in a time they view as a ‘golden age’. What they don’t have in common is which era they view as their ‘golden age’.

SPOILER ALERT: Woody seems to suggest that the concept of a ‘golden age’ is an illusion. 

That’s the thing about nostalgia: it blurs the lenses through which we see our world. If we feel nostalgic about a certain time in our own lives, usually we are remembering, even feeling, the people, places and things that brought us joy. Nostalgia filters out any of the negatives that would rob us of that joy. If we looked back with eyes wide open, we might remember the struggles or obstacles or challenges we faced. We might remember just how painful those struggles, obstacles, and challenges really were. 

If we wistfully feel nostalgia for a time before our own time, we can't see it through our own eyes. We have to see it through someone else’s: our parents’, our grandparents’, maybe Hollywood’s. And in that case we are likely getting a glorified look at how great that time was in comparison to our own.

So back to my commute home: Was my life really better six years ago? In the past few months, things have been rough, and we've been working hard to get them back where we want them. Happiness has been not so much a state, but a goal; and we are still headed in the same direction, even though we may have taken a detour here and there. If I wipe away the nostalgia and look back, though, I can see more details. We weren't completely content. We struggled with work and life balance. We felt the need to escape, and spending time on the coast allowed us to do that. I understand that intellectually and still, I long for a simpler time—a ‘golden age’. 

I realize now: Nostalgia isn't like taking a wrong turn on a road trip. It's like turning the car around and going back to where you came from. Sometimes, that is part of the journey. Sometimes, we need to go back in order to go forward. But nostalgia can trap us into thinking that we should stay “back there”, that it is so much better than what lies ahead. 

There's a place for the past. We learn from it, we benefit from the experiences of others and our own that are behind us, and we enjoy the entertainments and lifestyles of times gone by. We feel a connection to facets of those times that speak to our personality, and therefore a connection to the people as well. But nostalgia makes a better photo album than a road map. I’ll bring it along so I can learn from memories both good and not-so-good. Who knows? Maybe  there is a ‘golden age’ after all, just up ahead. If so, I can only get there if I keep going forward. 

Drive on.