I imagine it’s something that happens to everybody at one time or another: a kind of weird mini-nostalgia that comes sweeping down out of nowhere at certain times of the year.
It’s not something that you have to command your thoughts to do, they do it for you without being asked.
There’s some new or different thing in the world around you that triggers your memory, and you suddenly remember what you were doing and enjoying the last time you sensed that thing: the temperature of the outside air changes, or maybe the angle of the sun; the trees either grow leaves, or riot with color, or fall bare.
You look out the window at the sky and the weather, and for the first time in months you feel either compelled to get out and enjoy the day, or compelled to wrap yourself in a blanket and stay indoors with a book or a game (and five times out of seven you have to go to work anyway, and it doesn’t make much difference).
Whatever you see or feel or smell that spurs your mind and memory, you’re suddenly swept up in remembering the things you’ve done before, and wanting to do them again. It could be something you used to do in childhood, or something you just did last year at the same time, the feeling is in effect the same.
It’s this sort of nostalgia, I’m sure, that’s the source of many of our yearly traditions and customs, wanting to the good old things once more when the time feels right for them.
Of course the largest and most noticeable effect this has in our culture is holidays; we all do more or less the same things every year, with the same images, foods, songs, more or less to celebrate that a particular time of year has rolled around again and, maybe, to think a little about what that time of year means. Probably mostly the food though.
The holiday business, especially as regards the Holidays (now descending fast upon us) is a billion-dollar industry, or more like a billion-dollar time of the year for almost every industry. The ritual has so much commercial and emotional importance for us that the struggle between the emotional and the commercial aspect has become itself codified as part of the ritual in hundreds of odd/meaningful ways. (See: “true meaning of Christmas” on the wikipedia; yes it has its own article.)
But more relevant to this post than holidays, and having more impact I think on my life year by year, albeit in a more subtle way and spread out over a much longer time, are the little things that come back to me each year and which tie me to the past every time I’m reminded of them, and wind up wishing to re-live them again.
Stories wind up being the biggest part of this: when spring, and especially summer, come in, the first thing I want to do is pop in a movie or game I’ve watched or played almost every summer before, or steer the course of my reading or audiobook listening back through the same familiar waters I’ve gone through at that time of year twice, three, four times before. The feeling is almost something like “oh good I’ve waited long enough, I can freely enjoy this work again without getting bored with it.”
(For instance, Beverly Hills Cop comes around every May/June, Jaws in June/July, The Fifth Element in July/August, and so forth. With books, the schedule is way more cluttered, and would be difficult to clearly describe without drawing a chart.)
I suppose it’s all tied pretty directly to one of the odd things about being an adult for me so far, that being a general craving for familiar and friendly places, people, and things, especially during times of anxiety or stress but generally felt at any old time you like. Life can be a long and lonely thing, or feel that way sometimes, and when something we know and recognize as good for our morale comes along it can be a great help.
So we make little mini-traditions for ourselves, and, if we’re lucky, with our loved ones, and we reenforce this feeling of nostalgia and it makes us happy.
The upside to this effect is that I get a chance to revisit with characters and stories that I love and that have had an impact on my life. Since over time the stories you love become part of your story too, it’s good to be familiar with the shapes of your interest and to seek an understanding of what it is about that work that makes it meaningful.
Plus, for me at least, I know I never quite parse everything in an audiobook as well as I do when I’m reading the page, so re-listening to good works, especially the classics, almost always turns up something new.
I heard somewhere that to really grasp a classic in its fullness you need to read it three times. I would add that, at least for me, you need to listen to an audiobook at least three times to grasp it in fullness as well. Get a bunch of classics on audiobook then and you’ll have work to do for years.
The downside is probably obvious: you spend time doing things you’ve done before, when you could be spending it doing things that are new to you.
The other downside is that this effect tends to be cumulative: more often than not the reason why a certain work is attached in my mind to a certain time of year is that it just happens that it was the time of the year when I first encountered it. So if one keeps indulging this impulse to re-live the past, and adding more things to the , that winds up being more of a prison in time than a healthy indulgence of personal tradition.
Sure, you’re guaranteed to enjoy the things you’ve done before, because you know you enjoyed them last time (that is, if you’re not sick of them yet), but the weight of all that nostalgia sooner or later starts becoming a burden.
Probably the best way around this is to, or course, balance the old with the new; I find a one-part-old-two-parts-new formula is probably healthiest, that is for every time I indulge in a Dennis tradition, I try to make time for two new things before I re-read something again, although, truth be told, I’m not always as likely to follow said formula as I’d like (times of stress and anxiety, after all).
Or, better still, the better you know your tastes and your reasons for liking things, the better equipped you’ll be to find new things that might have the same feel as the good old thing you’re craving, but still count as a new and different experience. Make a mini-tradition of watching a new film of a certain genre or of a certain quality (I find watching bad with friends usually beats watching good alone) at a certain time of the year, and you may find it more rewarding than you’d think.
Of course, in the end, do whatever makes you happy and feel inspired. The stories you love are a part of your story, whether you like it or not; it’s just a shame and a necessary truth that the time we have, for both reliving our own happy memories and making new ones, is not unlimited.
But, are there movies/books/games you enjoy every year? Am I the only one this happens to?
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