Living In The Past

When I remember the past it seemed like a simpler time. When we’re children we don’t have a care in the world. The lucky ones have a roof over their heads, have someone to feed and clothe them, and hopefully nurture them into being the best person they can be. Most of us, as children, do not have many responsibilities other than going to school and occasional chores around the house. We are not concerned with what’s going on outside of our cocoon, as we don’t think world events affect us much. Our view of life is pretty myopic as kids.

We all like to reminisce and look at old photos. Maybe some of the people in our photo albums are no longer part of our life. They could be friendships, people with whom we no longer work, and we’ve lost touch with them, people who now live in different parts of the country or the world, families broken apart by divorce or death.

I don’t know if it’s the “older” generation, but all you have to do is look around you and nostalgia is everywhere. There are TV stations dedicated to decades past that broadcast nothing but TV shows from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. Once we got to the 90’s they were starting to make DVDs of popular shows – that was the old way of binge-watching! Now you can find pretty much any TV show from any era on cable or a streaming service and binge-watch all you want!

Remember When…

And remember back in the days of the five-and-dime stores, or record stores where you would go to see if the new release from your favorite band was out on a 45 or album yet? If it wasn’t, you’d put in your order for them to hold it aside for you as soon as it came in. For all the formats that evolved for listening to music – from vinyl to 8-track to cassette to CD to digital – you can now find any song you want. Even those hard-to-find records that you had to wait for back in the day. The good thing about that is that younger generations can now listen and appreciate some of the music that influenced the artists they now follow. And I have to admit that I have spent more than a little bit of time watching some of these old shows. And I think I know why.

First – life has been harder for everyone since Covid. We all had to be in a lockdown for periods of time. Many parents had to start home-schooling their children and balance working from home with all the distractions.

Second – it was an election year in the U.S., which divided many people and continues to this day and also affects our relations with other world countries. The issues surrounding why a candidate gets elected are still issues and aren’t going away anytime soon. Racism, border control, gender issues, women’s rights, wars, inflation, school curriculum, and our civil liberties are still problems with no clear solutions that, depending on your beliefs, may be being used to further a political agenda, and are things that keep us at odds with our fellowman.

Third – older Americans were forced, because of the pandemic, to either take a cut in pay or work hours or were forced into an early retirement. Which left them nothing but time on their hands. “Who’s going to hire me now at my age?” “What will I do now to feel like a productive individual who contributes to society?” “How will my quality of life change due to my new financial situation?”

Put all of these things together and you have a recipe for wanting to escape. “Stop the world – I wanna get off!”

Reminiscing…or Escaping?

So, trying to escape for a little while to what you thought was a simple time in your life can be very enticing. And oldies music can be a wonderful thing because you can listen to music anywhere while you’re doing other things. An old familiar tune can transport you back to a time in your life that you can relive that time in your mind and for a few moments and be a mood lifter from the troubles of today.

You have to be a bit more engaged when you’re watching old TV shows. But it’s a funny thing…there’s an old late-night talk show that was my parent’s favorite that I also used to watch back then. When I catch an episode now, the host still talks about the same topics in the monologue that today’s talk show hosts do – politics, foreign policy, wars, inflation, racism – the very things that divide us today! The very things that are troubling in the present were also present back then.

I guess the difference for me is that seeing or listening to something from those bygone eras puts me in a different place emotionally. We can still have some of the same struggles in life, but as a younger person, there seems to be more hope back then that things would get better and statistically more years for that to happen. We also didn’t have the Internet at that time and the means to have access to all of the things we do today. They say that knowledge is power, yet I don’t know that having all of that information has advanced us as a society much.

An occasional trip down Memory Lane can be a good thing. But it’s when we wish we could go back to a certain time to get away from the way things are now that Memory Lane can lead you right off a cliff. Because we have had so much time on our hands and have been told we can’t be with our families on holidays or that we shouldn’t hug our friends and keep at a certain distance, we have grown weary, and we just want to escape somewhere.

The powers-that-be have been making choices for us that many feel have crossed a line with regard to our civil liberties. So much information and so much misinformation. Who do you trust? For those of you with mental health issues, I can’t even imagine how this has accelerated certain thoughts for you. If you haven’t done so already, please get help for what happened in your past. There is life beyond the past. Jeremiah 29:11 tells us that God has plans for us – “a hope and a future.”

A steady diet of living in the past robs us of today. I know several people who have been terribly hurt in their marriages, which ended in divorce, and instead of trying to move forward they constantly relive what happened and become their own worst enemy by refusing to trust anyone ever again. Our minds are a very powerful thing, and by doing this, negative pathways are reinforced, which affects future relationships.

Our choices have been limited but it’s important to deal with what our reality is in THIS day and to be grateful for what the past has taught us and for the people it brought into our lives, if only temporarily, to help us grow and learn the lessons that were meant for us by knowing them. And for us to seek outside help if we need it in order to cope.