Recently, for the first time in a long time, I played the game Oregon Trail.  Having actually visited the Oregon Trail Interpretation Center in Baker City, and walked over some of the ruts the wagons had made nearby, it just seemed right to re-acquaint myself with the game that had started my own interest in the Oregon Trail [1].  The game was everything I had remembered it to be, faced with difficult choices, terrible graphics and music, and all kinds of gloomy events happening, like having your wife drown or die of measles, or your children get broken bones.  For whatever reason, when I was playing last night my wife kept dying pretty early on in the trip.  At any rate, beyond a mere exercise in nostalgia, it was a reminder that I had remembered the game accurately, both for its good parts and for its bad parts.  Ultimately, if the game appears ridiculously primitive now, some twenty five years or so after I first played it, that is hardly surprising.  What worked in the past still works now; we cannot hold against it that it had flaws and shortcomings inherent in the technological limitations of its time.  At least, if we are to be just judges, we cannot judge something anachronistically.

As part of the soundtrack to work, as a way of helping keep me calm when there are people frequently walking around behind me, something I particularly dislike, I listen to a lot of classic albums as well as song reviews.  One of the albums, which is in my Florida collection, that I like to listen to often is the self-titled debut album of Mike & The Mechanics.  Released originally in 1985, the album featured two top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100:  “Silent Running (Can You Hear Me?)” and “All I Need Is A Miracle” as well as a top 40 hit with the reflective album closer “Taken In.”  All of those songs are great songs, but more importantly than that, the album of a whole is solid.  There is not a single song on the album that is tossed off without development, and that is not invested with conviction on the part of those singing as well as playing.  The album mixes paranoid political reflections, including, in “A Call To Arms,” one of the greatest songs about peace in rock & roll, as well as reflections on relationships gone wrong, and comments on the decline of manhood somewhat ironically in “Take The Reins,” and switches effortlessly from upbeat songs about the difficulties of life and the futility of repeating the same dysfunctional cycles (like “I Get The Feeling”) to downcast songs about memory (like “Par Avion”).  The whole album just works, and more than 30 years after it was released, it shines all the brighter in the face of many contemporary albums that sold more copies at the time but did not have the same sort of staying power.

I have never considered myself a particularly nostalgic person by nature, largely because memory has been a subject of considerable personal difficulty [2].  Yet at the heart of nostalgia is a love of comfort.  Human beings, myself included, have a great love of comfort that is in frequent tension with our desire for growth and change.  We fall easily into ruts, eating comfort food, listening to comfort music, reading comfort books that are not very different from hundreds of other books that we have read but being comfortable because the differences are only skin deep but the similarities in structure, tone, and pattern are appealing to us.  Rather than condemning something for nostalgic appeal, let us remember that the appeal of nostalgia is, like the appeal of tradition, an essentially conservative appeal, giving us a sense of roots in the midst of a world full of change and disruption.  We are beings that, like trees, have both branches and trunks reaching for the sun as well as roots dug deep into the ground, and to reject either aspect of our nature is to do violence to ourselves, for it is from our roots that we gain stability, structure, and nourishment from our environment as well as from our individual and collective history.  Even where history is an unpleasant matter, we can still learn from it and grow from it.

How, then, do we use our common tendency for comfort and nostalgia for our benefit, seeing as it is a consistent part of our natures, without letting the love of what is familiar keep us stuck too much in deep ruts dug into the limestone rock?  On the one hand, we can deliberately seek to act outside of our comfort zone but inside of our competence, so that we can through practice and success expand what is comfortable and familiar to us, and what we can be nostalgic about later on during those more reflective moments that we all have from time to time.  On the other hand, we can seek what is potentially new and unusual in what is familiar by looking at it deeper and in more detail, seeing layers of depth and meaning where we only looked at the surface layers before.  In so doing, we can find something unusual and noteworthy even in what is familiar, recognizing that even what is well-known and well-beloved can have aspects that strike us with a new force when we see them in another light.  After all, few of us know ourselves or anything else deeply enough that there is nothing left for us to enjoy or to examine, as the mood strikes us.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/05/24/book-review-the-oregon-trail/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/off-the-beaten-trail/

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/comfort-foods/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/when-i-have-no-money-i-buy-food/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/creatures-of-habit/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/04/21/speak-memory/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/05/22/a-trip-down-memory-lane/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/history-and-memory/