We see through a mirror darkly; the world to come has been forecast and foreshadowed; it is a great mystery even so. However, behind us, days of the past remain. Memory and imagination hold onto manifold moments--moments of joy, pain, and longing. This part of our lives never really leaves us; we contend with it every day through fondness or sadness.
There are certain moments passed that particularly possess power within our memories. The smallest thing can elicit them: a certain song lyric, a smell, a phrase, or a view out the window possess the power to spade these from our consciousness. Whether you are dealing with nostalgia or an old wound, you are interacting with a world that still exists in some ephemeral way with you today.
As creative beings, we often narrativize our lives. Memory acts as a kind of hindsight narrator, reminding us what happenings matter and what they did for our lives. As both audience and narrator of our memory, we experience the bulk of our past through the abstract realm of the mind. Pictures, videos, letters, art, notes all play the role of secondary actors in helping our memory but they are not the substance of what our memory is.
Shared memories even more so suggest that we rely on the abstract to understand life meaningfully or correctly. Oftentimes we have no physical or empirical method to prove a memory has occurred. Other people that share a moment with us narrate and perceive these times in ways that can obfuscate, enhance, or clarify our moments together. We see all of these memory modifiers when hanging out with old high school friends; stories get jumbled up, some get larger with time, others are forgotten completely, and some we reminisce upon with clarity.
Nostalgia impacts us through the confluence of emotion and information. All memories exist within in our imagination, but the reality of these events are colored by the associations we make with them. The nature of these events change with time. A night sitting around the campfire with friends is a moment of fellowship; our joyful memory of that event changes it into something that we integrate into our sense of what reality ought to be. Another way to put it--an event is just that; it is how we remember it and respond to it that makes it special.
The combination of angst, longing, and joy we feel from our most potent nostalgic memories seem to affect us beyond how the events at that time did. We cannot see our personal narrative clearly in the moment because we are caught up with ourselves and others around us in the physical world. Contemplation and a degree of self awareness may aid in that endeavor, but it is in the remembering where value is found most deeply.
One may argue the depth of nostalgic memory is some kind of leftover side effect of evolutionary adaptation; perhaps a useful tool to promote in-group loyalty and sacrifice. Instead, I think the abstract nature of this memory points towards another part of our person--a part that longs for true love, peace, and belonging. Our longing for a time past elevates what was a normal occurrence into the realm of the sublime reaching for the sacred.
The sacred is something even the most secular among us are acquainted with. We instinctively respond to funerals with a solemnity beyond the normal experience of life. At an open casket funeral we hesitate to reach out and touch a loved one, as we perceive the essence of the person is beyond us now. We would be wrong to interact with them as we normally do.
In the scope of joyful things, our nostalgic memories reveal our heart’s desire to be content with the world and those we love. These memories possess a certain fogginess to them, certain details hide themselves within the past. However, we can easily feel the effect of these moments through remembrance. If we could live in those moments of joy and life forever, we would be truly happy.
This is similar to what Christians long for in the coming of Christ. All of the happy memories of days past, things we may never experience again in the same way, will be replaced with new joyful times without the stains of evil, sin, or tragedy that plague the world around us. The hope Christians possess is not an escapist one where we fly up into the heavens for all of eternity, rather it is that the world shall be made new and our moments with others, of which we have had with great mirth, shall be a thing of unadulterated joy forever.
If our memory and our mind are not merely products of brain activity, instead something prompted from the spirit or soul, then our perception of the past is informed by something metaphysical as well as physical. Paul, the Apostle, tells us that we are not of the world but in it. The world to come does not lose its physicality. Its physical nature becomes more fully enjoyable than we can possibly imagine. Our spirit longs for this kind of world; our imaginations and memories point us towards that desired destination.