Nostalgia has a bad rap these days. Like all romantically (in the literary sense) affiliated feelings, it’s seen as cheesy, overplayed, and a little cliched. We’re allowed it in small doses — a sappy film every once in a while, the recounting of a childhood memory, or reminiscing about an especially wonderful evening.
Some people just prefer to eschew nostalgia altogether and enjoy the present free from any sense of longing.
Yet there are still so many of us who find indulging in the past irresistible.
We are young, but already childhood has slipped away, as has high school, and some of college too. After a bad day, memories transport us to what seem like better, sunnier times.
Memory is a fickle friend, though. As the past moves further away, our memories become rosier. The ugly parts fade away, and the good memories prevail.
When I reflect on the past year of my life, I think first about the highlights — sharing meals with close friends, setting off fireworks over a lake, ice-skating in Yosemite under winter lights. What I tend not to think about are the darker memories: days where I couldn’t bring myself to leave the house, hard break-ups, failure.
In general, our life experiences are pretty stable. Added up, the good parts and the bad parts weigh about the same, yet positive experiences overpopulate our memory banks.
Herein lies the beauty of rose-colored glasses. When we reflect on the past, our mind automatically sacrifices the bad moments to make room for the good ones. Selective memory, as a small token to our overall satisfaction, helps us see the silver linings.
Praise memory's finite capacity, because if we kept in our thoughts every negative experience, I think we’d be a pretty miserable species. The darker memories are still there, of course, but they’re safely stowed away, for the most part.
In this way, our faulty memory inadvertently encourages us to hold on to life’s most fulfilling moments while the darker ones fade into the background. We may curse our brain’s limitations, especially when we lose some of life’s most precious moments, but we must also take into consideration the benefits that this cleansing process provides.
It may be inevitable, but the ability to forget is also a blessing.
