Am I Allowed to Feel Nostalgic?

In reading the new biography of George C. Marshall, I found my thoughts drawn back to the place where I had my first library job, Marshall's hometown of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. A co-worker and I were talking at lunch about places we'd lived in the past, and I wondered if I was allowed to feel nostalgia at twenty-six, or whether that somehow seemed too early. I can't explain the feeling, because in many ways the months spent in Uniontown were the worst of my life. While I loved my co-workers, the ugliness and poverty of the place depressed me, the tightness of my financial state constantly gnawed at me, the reality of life after graduation clashing heavily with what I had hoped would come next, and I found that my natural tendencies towards melancholy and self-pity bottomed out into complete and endless depression.

I had a similar feeling of nostalgia last week when I was browsing the Earth and Mineral Sciences library on Penn State's main campus. It drew me back to thoughts of my time in grad school, some evenings spent browsing the stacks in the university library there. Grad school too was not a happy time in my life, with the stress of job-hunting and deep-seated insecurity about all aspects of my life, both present and future. But browsing the shelves of a university library, at ease among rows of challenging reading to stimulate my mind, I felt at home again. I'd forgotten how much I missed living in a university town.

Perhaps nostalgia isn't quite the word I'm looking for. It encompasses some of what I've felt, but not nearly all. Perhaps perspective is the better choice. At both of those points in my life, the present was so depressing that I found I could not imagine a future worth hoping for and working towards. Being able to look back and recognize those places as the temporary way stations they were, a recognition I should have been able to make at the time, helps give me more hope for my own future than I have long been able to muster. During those periods, I could not have known where I would be now, three years on. I could not have known what changes could happen in such a short period of time. I've traded the insecurities of three years ago for other ones, the old worries for new, but the perspective of thinking back to these times helps me to meet these with just a bit more courage than I once had, so that when the melancholy asserts itself, I can push it back again.

Not nostalgia, perhaps, but something better. A hopefulness for the future rather than a wistfulness for the past. And that is far more useful.

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