The Hounds of Memory

On the Allure of Nostalgia and the Power of Regret

Don’t let anyone ever say to you you shouldn’t regret anything. Don’t do that. Don’t! You regret what you f@#&ing want! Use that. Use that regret for anything, any way you want.
— Jason Robards as Earl Partridge: Magnolia 1999: written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine - you mourn things that actually happened.
— Pete Hamill
I don’t like nostalgia unless it’s mine.
— Lou Reed

Our exploration into the halls of memory, thankfully, is something we never get away from. Though it may grow a touch murky later in life. It is also something we never fully grasp. Memory is a great deal like water, in that it is both constant and recognizable, yet forever moving, mixing, and dispersing, and then later rejoining in new but identifiable patterns. Our ability to touch the past, if only through thought, is a strange and beautiful gift, one that holds many keys to our internal makeup, our decision-making style, our relationships, and how we navigate our future.

While it is our decisions and their effect upon the world that serve as our physical testament, memory works as a kind of metaphysical testament, a remnant of a singular life and its quest to touch the world beyond the boundaries of our flesh. It is an internal echo of the influence we leave upon the fabric of existence.

Leaving a Mark

Men and women don't carve things like "Matthew was here," or "Sarah walked this trail," into stone walls and trees just because they enjoy vandalism. They do so because solidifying a firm place in the world and declaring our time among the living is a primal need for all sentient beings. It is another small way to brand the face of reality with our mark, to remind ourselves and others that we did, in fact, live, and that something of us will not completely perish when we have gone.

To be sure, having children, creating something unique, building anything, mentoring or loving others, these are all more powerful and more lasting ways of firming up our place here, since each of these people can testify to our love, creativity, and influence. But sometimes we'll tattoo our place into the world any way we can, even if cutting or burning our names into a log or painting a wall is what we've got at the time. Our need is too great not to. It pours from us like wine bursting from an over-filled vessel. So, if it is our choices that serve as our legacy in the world, what then, is the function and value of our memories?

What Are They Worth?

A good question to ask ourselves is, "Are all memories valuable? They are, though they might not all be useful. You might think it strange that I would say this, that something can have worth without being useful. But many things in life are valued for their emotional, psychological, and existential weight, not for what they can immediately accomplish in the world. Each memory has its own balms and afflictions to leave us. Each one has little angels and devils that want to either heal or hinder our path. And for the most part, whether they heal or hold us back is entirely up to us.

The field of human memory, from both an individual and collective level, is entirely too vast to tackle in the scope of one article. Today, I want, simply, to look at two key destinations along this path, namely nostalgia and regret, to suss out what each might hold for us. Why these two? Well, because both of these tend to loiter about our thoughts more often than other types of memories.

Both regret and nostalgia have value. They have as much worth as any other mechanism that allows us to travel in time psychologically and emotionally. They are both catalysts for this perceptual time travel and altars of remembrance, that is, internal structures built to honor something of significance. And the more we can remember, the more we can learn. Don't forget, though, that altars can either be very good - places of contemplation and gratitude. Or they can be very bad - places where life itself is consumed by fires burned to lesser and darker gods.

Pain, it turns out, is sometimes the most necessary and powerful component in personal growth, and in our ability to become more selfless and empathetic.

The Nature of Regret

On a purely practical level, regret is the more useful of the two. Since it rattles, destabilizes, and occasionally gives us the subtle, or not so subtle, swat we need to stop doing the same stupid things simply because we've always done them that way. The bitterness of regret, of everything we have missed, avoided, or failed at, can be so intense that to finally exorcise that taste from our mouth, we are either forced to make radical changes to both our present thought processes and the choices we make for our future, or we succumb to its afflictions and discover a new level of self-defeat. And with regret, each descending level is more difficult to climb out of.

Pain, it turns out, is sometimes the most necessary and powerful component in personal growth. It is vital to our pursuit of a life defined by selflessness, leadership, and empathy. Pain is a brutal teacher. And the only way to avoid his lessons is to repress and self-medicate. Two things from my own experience that I wouldn't recommend to anyone.

You can regret to the point of finally changing the pattern that led you to that state of mind in the first place. When this discipline comes quickly, as it can for any of us when we don't repress or deny the difficult realities of our lives, we can skip a wide range of future mistakes. But regret, by nature of its tendency toward self-loathing and hopelessness, often hurts more than it helps. Like any sharp tool, its uses are specific and immediately practical. But just about any other application outside its intended function can mangle you beyond recognition.

Regret is a gift when we see it for what it is, the pain of a reality not congruent with our vision, the pain of either decision or indecision that threw us to the ground or left us behind when everyone else blew right by, and the pain of connections and relationships we have left poorly tended. But this realization and our response to it must come quickly and with clarity. It's okay to feel terrible, to feel depressed for a while, to be unresolved, dissatisfied, even lost. These are normal states of being for every human, and part of the journey each of us must take.

Too Much Staying Power

Regret, though, has a way of keeping us there, of leading us in circles around the same failures, as we shuffle along, staring blankly, and mumbling to ourselves about what could have been. To be of any use, we have to deliberately bend regret's arc, its circular shape into something a bit more straight, albeit with several inevitable detours.

We have to remind ourselves that regret's pain is worthy of being felt and digested because the things we've missed or messed up are worthy of being felt, experienced, valued, and remembered. Regret reminds us that our choices matter, that they hold weight, and that these choices have consequences, both for good and ill, that will remain with us for the entirety of our lives.

No One Walks Away Clean

I've known a handful of people who have told me that they have no regrets in life. On the surface this sounds appealing, if a shade self-help-y. But they are either self-satisfied to the point of blindness, often because they think people find this inanity attractive, or purposely refusing to recognize the negative significance of many of their own actions. And both of these are dangerous states of mind.

Nostalgia is a visitation and an exploration, a venture through old halls that hold so much value and significance, that they refuse to remain entirely in the past.

I suppose if what they mean is closer to the "I've got no regrets because I've come to accept both the good and the bad and continue to learn from each of them," then I'm a fan. But this mindset doesn't negate, it affirms regret as a potential mechanism for personal refinement. By this statement, these individuals confirm that there are decisions they aren't proud of and have chosen to learn from.

Unfortunately, this statement more often exits the mouth of one well-meaning but repressed individual who believes the image of perfection is more important than the imperfect pursuit of excellence, or one who experiences incredible difficulty and a strong aversion to dealing directly with any personal error larger than a missed appointment or an uncomfortable phone call.

They are often the ones who believe that image constitutes reality, that perception dictates truth, and that the sting of regret is only a negative influence. And for this, they completely miss the capacity for failed opportunities to fuel certain changes they've wanted to realize for a long time, and to uncover disparities that can only be revealed when you go a few rounds with the pugilists of regret.

The key is to remember that regret is both inevitable, an occasional and natural bi-product of living and making choices, and that we must put it to use, not simply feel it or swim around in its waters. It's a wise place to visit sometimes, a lost highway motel that we should approach with transparency, humility, perspective, and intent. It is neither a companion for an intimate meal shared nightly nor a long and abiding relationship...unless you've got a thing for nagging, abusive dinner dates and heavy-handed, unforgiving partners.

Shot or Bottle?

Nostalgia is less immediately useful than regret. But like I hinted at earlier, some of the greatest things, the most life-giving and essential, are not strictly useful, in that cool, efficient, productive way we judge so many things and so many people in our time - as if the mechanization of humanity was a goal worthy of pursuit. Nostalgia, along with other things like play, kissing, and deep laughter, are some of the more buoyant gifts we uncover. Yet, they are not primarily about usefulness, but a deeper experience of life.

Nostalgia is a visitation and an exploration, a venture through old halls that hold so much value and significance, that they refuse to remain entirely in the past. They rise from the fog of so much history to reclaim certain spaces of our psyche and certain chambers of the heart we'd assumed had already been given to new tenants.

Good memories and their cousin nostalgia, help us join the past to the present, to spot some of the invisible cords that link different seasons of life together into a more cohesive narrative. These explorations of the heart and mind can remind us of things we prematurely or wrongly left behind, certain mindsets and outlooks that were more expansive, more compassionate, and more creative.

Nostalgia and regret are not in direct opposition, they are brothers cut from the same genetic cloth. Regret is simply nostalgia turned up to eleven. And either one, if left playing on repeat for weeks on end, will deafen us to reason and objectivity.

These psychological trips help us view our choices, both past and present, not merely as functional necessities for getting things done, but meaningful, existential passages, more significant than the sum of their parts. These memories can help us find new levels of compassion, respect, and grace for others, as we revisit the layers of our shared experiences and take note of the complexities that influenced their behavior.

However, you can easily hover in nostalgia for too long. Nostalgia is a tonic that turns into an opiate and a toxin if left in the bloodstream. Its rewards are addictive and its promises are often empty. Nostalgia rounds off the edges of days gone by. It fixates on the positive sometimes to the point of delusion. And it can oversimplify periods of great complexity. While lingering isn't immediately dangerous, an excess of nostalgic wandering, can, strangely enough, lead to more regret.

This is because nostalgia and regret are not in direct opposition, they are brothers cut from the same genetic cloth. Regret is simply nostalgia turned up to eleven. And either one, if left playing on repeat for weeks on end, will deafen us to reason and objectivity. They are best served in small portions, sizable enough to have an impact, not large enough to do any lasting damage.

With those more intense bouts of nostalgia, where sunsets give way to private apocalypses, where you suddenly find yourself sliding through tunnels regretting your inability to save that "perfect" relationship, infuriated that you didn't make better choices regarding your career and your investments, that you didn't figure out how to keep every good thing and every good season of life locked away inside a glass container for eternal preservation, in these internal fights, memory becomes our undoing. This notion that we should’ve been able to preserve everything good is an impossibility rendered no less potent, and perhaps more so, because of the intensity of the sweetness and the ecstasy we experience when reality works out in our favor. From a purely statistical perspective, it is a rarity, these times when life seems to work entirely in our favor. But it happens just enough that we convince ourselves that this is how life is supposed to function every time.

Forever in Motion, Always in the Same Room

All memory is bound to something transitory and temporal. But it is equally bound to the eternal. It has been written upon the pages of our lives, into the very book of existence. And there isn't a single force that can erase this. Good or bad, we have our choices and our experiences and the consequences left in their wake.

Memory, whatever skin it wears, is a gateway into this simultaneously shifting and fixed arena. The most important question isn't even "What will we do with our memories?", in that kind of modern ode to efficiency and self-actualization. The prime question is "What do they mean to us?" Answer this first and making use of them gets easier.

This concept works in a number of life's arenas. We can use just about everything we find or experience as a tool to accomplish or change something. But these movements remain empty if they hold no deeper meaning for us, if they are not connected to a larger defining story. Not only do we realize more dramatic changes when passion and relationship are part of the fuel, but we begin to see the trenches of meaning beneath our feet, the ones in the ocean's floor where we'd previously believed our descent had already found its endpoint.

Memory is neither something to be worshiped nor despised. And like any good thing in this life, it is never something we should hold too tightly

Loose Hand for a Better Grip

Memory is a profound gift, even exalted. It is our mysterious, unbounded doorway into the place where reality and dreams collide, where experience and changing perceptions play an ever-shifting role in the way we value the entirety of our existence. Memory is our conscious and subconscious link to things we can no longer touch, but somehow, in the mind and spirit, still taste and smell.

Memory is neither something to be worshiped nor despised. And like any good thing in this life, it is never something we should hold too tightly, gripping it inside our fist in the vain hope that doing so will allow us to control everything we were never meant to.

Like emotion, memory should flow through us when it comes, painting our present with colors only the past can offer. And it should inform the days to come with a clarity that materializes when we remain honest about our past, and open to every painful and ecstatic nuance that memory affords.

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