nostalgia

For the last several days I have been listening obsessively to Josh Ritter's "Homecoming."

The album that contains it (Sermon on the Rocks) came out just before Meg and I went to see him in concert in Detroit in 2016 (omg like a year and a half ago already, damn has a lot happened since then), but for various reasons I didn't get around to listening to it until this past weekend, when the album arrived on my doorstep (yes, I still listen to CDs) just in time for my road trip to go camping with Meg and Phillip (road trips are my favorite time to listen to new music, for the full-surround effect and uninterrupted listening time).

I was not prepared for "Homecoming."

Nostalgia is a powerful thing.  Listening to the vitality and joy in memory that pounds through the piece stirred the wellspring of nostalgia in my own breast.  Five days later I'm still dancing in the car to it, wrapped in that beautiful sense of longing.

The funny part is, I'm not sure what I'm nostalgic for.  I like my hometown, but I don't feel any sense of belonging to it.  I left it as soon as I could upon graduating college, and only returned to it reluctantly years later, feeling like an alien but disciplining myself to settling there for five years before striking out excitedly for Detroit.  I have stronger home-ties to South Bend, the place where I first began to come into my own, and now to Detroit, where I am finally thriving, than I do to the place where I was born.  I left my heart in New Mexico a few years ago, and every once in awhile a longing for the desert mountains and lush river valley of Taos pierces me with breathlessness -- I want to retire there.  But mostly my nostalgia isn't tied to a sense of place.  I don't think it ever will be.  I love Detroit, love my sketchy city neighborhood, love the skyscrapers and the architecture and the history and the people.  Will I be here forever?  Probably not.  For the time being I'm happy to stay here long term, but you never know what life is going to bring you, and there's a lot of world to see, and a lot of places to live.  "Home" to me is the whole damn planet.  "Home" is something I carry inside myself wherever I go. I will love living in Detroit for as long as I'm here; but if and when I leave it, I won't wish I could come back, because I'll love the next place just as much.  (Probably.  Unless it's Kansas or southern Illinois or something.)

So nostalgia for me doesn't connect to a sense of place; and it also doesn't really connect to a sense of time.  Or at least, not a past time.  High school?  Nooooope.  College?  Sometimes.  I do feel a certain fondness for that first taste of freedom, for afternoons sprawled under trees poring over the tissue-thin pages of a new semester's tomish Norton anthology, for the pocket of idyllic quiet that was the little town of Grove City.  But I don't want to go back.  My twenties?  Oh hell no.  (I've been consoling mid-twenty-somethings lately with the simple reassurance that the twenties suck.  They all look at me with huge eyes and breathe a sigh of relief.  Yeah, kid, it's going to be okay.  The twenties are the worst.  They'll pass.)  No time that came before is better than where I am now.  I love where I am now. 

I have habitually shaken the dust from my sandals every time I leave one phase of life and embark on another.  Not just because most of my phases of life, exclusive of the present, have been marked by suffering -- I don't think of things in mournful terms anymore, for the most part, and those times of suffering precipitated enormous growth, so I made them count.  I think it's more that I've always longed for what's to come far more than for what came before.  I'm always looking to the next adventure.  The nostalgia I feel is for all that I haven't experienced yet. 

Which isn't to say that I don't love the adventures I've already had.  I've done some really cool shit, and had some really cool experiences.  Even the shitty experiences aren't so shitty because of my resilience and strength, and I can smile like hell about everything I've overcome.  I keep those memories in a jar in my mind and periodically pour them out and turn them over in my hands, smiling.  I suppose that's technically nostalgia, although it doesn't fill me with longing so much as satisfaction and gladness and excitement for whatever's to come next.

There's no time or place in my past that I'd return to.  There's a person or two I would love to be able to reconnect with, but I wouldn't want to reconnect with them as I was when I knew them last; I'd want to reconnect with them as we are now.  The past can't be changed; the present is better; I'm better, so much more myself; and everything really does tend to work out for the best, so there's nothing I wish I could go back and fix so much as there are things that I wish I could do going forward.  Always forward.

Life always and only gets better.  Every year is better than the year that preceded it.  Even when tragedy strikes, even when shit is really hard, I'm always in a state of becoming, and as the arrow of time moves forward, I move and grow and change with it.  The future is full of new adventures, better relationships, a more evolved self, all building on one another until at the end of my (hopefully very long) life I will have amassed a treasure-trove of experiences that have shaped me, and add up to a human being who has crafted a profound fulfillment through a life of liberated self-determination.   Living well is an art.  I hope to master it.

So when I hear songs of nostalgia, I don't think back to happier times.  I think forward to them.  (With, these days, a healthy sense of joy in the immediate present.  My sense of homecoming is everywhere I go.)  I've led a really cool life so far, and always, the best is yet to come.

My homecoming is now, and my homecoming ever shall be.  (World without end. Amen.) 

And I still can't stop listening to that song, and smiling.