Trapped in the Glory of the Past

"Nostalgia is denial - denial of the painful present... the name for this denial is golden age thinking - the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one ones living in - its a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present." — Paul, "Midnight in Paris"

Change is hard. I have never dealt with change well — which is part of what made this year fun. I have a new wife, a new job, live in a new city, in a new state, in a new house we bought in March. For someone who isn't good at change, I've endured quite a bit of it the last 10 months. And I'd like to think I've handled it as well as I could.

But I still understand how hard change can be. I couldn't help but think about that as I was in a meeting this week with a group discussing how the group at church can deal with big change — the kind of change that comes with embracing the future.

As I was listening to others process this change, I couldn't help but wonder at how people romanticize the past. Of course, my mom would probably laugh at my incredulity at others as they deal with change. It's like pot, meet kettle. Still, sometimes it's easier to appreciate that reaction when it's presented in others.

I think it is human nature to want to cling to the past. There is comfort in the past, in the familiar. Change is hard. We aren't built to adapt to change well. And when we're in the midst of change, there's this tendency to yearn for the past. To hold up those times are superior.

Of course, that's not new. Woody Allen earned a few Academy Award nominations for the movie "Midnight in Paris," which featured a writer played by Owen Wilson who yearned to have lived during the classic writing era of the 1920s. He wanted to be with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway — he felt like that was the pinnacle of society.

Through a fantastic set of events, he is given a chance to go back in time and meet with those people. What he finds is a writer that yearns to have lived in the 1890s, before the turn of the century. While Wilson yearns for the 1920s, those in the 1920s yearn for an earlier period. The lesson being the past always seems more glorious than the present. It always has, and always will — generation after generation.

A similar theme is echoed in "No Country For Old Men," where Sheriff Ed Tom Bell thinks that the world has gotten harder. As he meets an old friend, he has that illusion challenged and shaken. He can't let it go, and it leaves him trapped and unable to move forward.

The same is true of us. We always want to cling to the past, when things seemed better. But the truth is, the world has changed. When I heard people talking about how things had changed from what they were 20 years earlier, my first thought was that people, society, the city, and our country had also changed. If you don't change, you risk being passed by. That's why we have books like "Adapt or die." It sounds harsh, but it's the truth of the world.

Our world constantly evolves, if we don't evolve with it, we'll get left behind.