Wake up! The past is sweet, but the present is sweeter

The past is a different country. And eventually, an alien land.

This is strange, coming from one who revels in nostalgia. I love reminiscing. I long to go back to the haunts of my youth. To the book-lined corridors of well-loved libraries, to the green shaggy mist-wrapped hills of the lower Himalayas, to lamp-lit studies warm with camaraderie amid the winter rain. To old floors of red cement, cool to the skin on long summer afternoons when the sun melted the tar on the roads outside. To a time that was safer, surer, purer, protected, innocent. And now I know that I never can go back.

Often it’s because those places just don’t exist any more. But that’s not the only reason. Sometimes I can’t find my way back to a moment in my past, because the place has changed beyond recognition. Sometimes the place is there, relatively unchanged, but it just doesn’t seem the same any more. And perhaps that’s because I have changed. And sometimes a moment in the past is impossible to reclaim because ... it never really was. It existed only in my mind, or in the mind of the person that I was. A person that I’m not, any more.

You know how we seek out old school-mates on Facebook? And spend hours chatting, posting, telephoning, organising reunions, just to discuss those good old school-days, those “best days of our lives”? Humbug. We only seek to reassure ourselves that our childhood was a shared wonder, an Elysian idyll.

Whereas in truth it was no such thing. With apologies to Jim Croce, “for every time that we spent laughing there were two times that we cried”. In the golden light of memory, six of the best on a tender posterior may be funny, but for a 12-year-old the threat of the teacher’s cane blotted out the sunshine. That myth we propagate, that our working lives are stressful while our school-days were worry-free? It IS a myth. How can we forget the pressure of homework, of exams, of swotting up formulae and tables when our eyelids were gummy with sleep?

The answer, of course, is selective memory. Except for moments of great trauma, we tend to remember only the good things from the past. So the past becomes this lost idyll, retreating ever farther through the gilded arches of memory.

In some cases, we change. The most common disillusionment is the change in scale. A full-grown man is significantly larger than a boy of five. When I go back to the haunts of my childhood, I’m always surprised that what used to be a cricket pitch is now a medium-sized lawn—  even though the boundaries have not moved an inch! The other change is in the mind. Think of birthday parties.

Or indeed, any parties. I am aghast that well into my 20s, my idea of a good time was to meet friends in a room with music playing far too loudly, and then to eat and drink until I felt sick. It could be the process of ageing. Or it could be that the modern world offers better ways to entertain myself.

And then, of course, we all have treasured moments that never existed. We made them up with the tools of perception. And we choose to preserve our delusions. Because living in the past is an escape from the pressures of the present.

I’ve woken up. The past was sweet. But living in the present is not only sweeter, it’s all we have. Carpe diem.

The author is a reluctant bureaucrat and an avid photographer.