Column: The unexpected moment when the past floods into the present

Making sense of nostalgia, one of life’s more complicated emotions

Working from home one weekday afternoon last April, I hit a routine post-lunch low-energy slowdown. In The War of Art, the writer Steven Pressfield calls the insidious force that keeps us from doing our most important work “Resistance;” that afternoon, I had been thoroughly defeated by Resistance. I was weak and vulnerable to distraction. It was probably only a matter of time before I was sucked into the depths of an online rabbit hole.

Even though I recognized the symptoms and sought to protect myself from incoming stimuli by setting my work email to “offline” mode, my defenses weren’t impenetrable. The distraction happened sneakily and unexpectedly, as it usually does. An article my brother texted me reminded me of a professional skier we’d admired a long time ago, someone whose name hadn’t crossed my mind in at least a decade. This skier and I were roughly the same age, so while I’m pretty sure I never met him, his name (and career trajectory) used to mean a great deal to me. The perfect distraction had arrived.

Three hours and dozens of browser tabs after Googling this former pro skier “just to see what he was up to,” I was feeling nostalgic — and not just for the productive afternoon I’d planned. A search for this person, whose ski videos I watched endlessly through the late 1990s and early 2000s during my skiing-obsessed adolescence, led me to the websites of Powder and Freeskier magazines. I read and reread these publications religiously until my early twenties. Like politics and writing would become later in my life, skiing was inseparable from how I saw myself. It was part of my identity.

Over the years, I invested a lot into skiing financially, emotionally, and — as my knees regularly remind me — physically. Some of my deepest friendships and most treasured family activities centered around it. I realize now that my passion for the sport wasn’t entirely about skiing itself; it was just as much about finding joy and fulfillment through sharing experiences and practicing a craft. But there’s still a part of me that feels I’ve betrayed my authentic self by not having kept up with the world of skiing. This impulsive dive into the internet last spring was a reminder that I’d long since broken my vow never to be the once-diehard skier who now finds himself on the mountain one day a year if he’s lucky.

All of this history made reading this skier’s name — and reopening this long-closed chapter — so jarring, and so thick with nostalgia. The more I searched and the more links I clicked, the more I was overcome by it. Somehow, this activity that had been such an important part of my life for so long had faded into a series of memories. Its disappearance had happened quietly and mostly subconsciously.

Nostalgia is the moment when suddenly, as we’re going about our lives, caught up in the day-to-day obligations that come with human existence in the twenty-first century, the past floods into the present. We’ve all had these moments: Driving by an old apartment and remembering when it was home. Seeing someone who reminds us of our first boss or a childhood classmate we’d forgotten about. Stumbling across a TV show we watched as a kid. Hearing a song we loved in high school. Catching a whiff of something, often food, that transports us back in time. Searching for an email we need and encountering a forgotten conversation from a decade ago.

These moments unleash powerful questions. They force us to reflect on all the life we’ve lived and all the time we’ve passed that somehow vanished quietly into our subconscious. How can once-meaningful chapters fade away so quickly? How much of who we once were have we forgotten? How well do we really know ourselves? It’s unsettling that something can be so central to our world one day, and then nonexistent the next. It just happens. I didn’t decide one day that “Starting tomorrow, I will not think about skiing.” I never filed paperwork with my brain that announced, “By order of management, beginning next week tenant will no longer spend time or attention on skiing.” (If forgetting were this intentional, losses and breakups and painful experiences would be way easier to endure.)

We don’t decide to think our last thought about something. We just don’t think about it anymore. Possibly forever, unless something jogs our memory, like getting a text message on a random afternoon. Then, surprisingly and usually without warning, this trigger unearths waves of memories and archived experiences from the depths of the memory bank. Nostalgia is what we feel when those waves, especially the positive and formative ones, crash into the present. It’s beautiful, rich, sad, and confusing.

It’s also often accompanied by curiosity. Whatever happened to that guy? What was I doing then? (By the way, I wonder if my parents still have my baseball cards?) A few hours after getting the text from my brother, I was still thoroughly distracted, so I spent some time indulging this curiosity and finding out what was going on in the professional skiing world. I wanted to know where the superstar skiers of my youth were now. What happened to these icons whose posters I had signed, whose biographies I knew by heart, whose jokes in ski movies friends and I told over and over again?

One of the more profound lessons I learned in politics was that elected officials and other well-known people are, in fact, human beings with anxieties, insecurities, emotions, and flaws. Many are desperate to be treated as human beings, not demigods placed on a pedestal and kept at arm’s length. Could the same be true of the ski heroes of my youth?

As my browser drowned in tabs, I was drowning in reminiscences and realizations. I thought about how my worldview had evolved, and I wasn’t sure how to process the humanity of the skiers who a younger me had looked to as icons and heroes. They won gold medals at the Winter X Games… and then they quit the sport to pursue another line of work. They toured the world, partying and skiing… and then they got injured and became industry representatives working for the next generation of pro skiers. They graced magazine covers and headlined bestselling ski films and signed autographs… and then they moved home and disappeared from the public eye. None of these outcomes was necessarily bad, of course. They were just more quotidian than twelve-year-old Adam expected.

The more I read that afternoon, the more nostalgia for my own childhood was mixed with a complex blend of sadness and leveling. These people who I’d admired for so long had accomplished some amazing things, but they were just as human as I was. When I was growing up, I wanted more than anything to be a professional skier. Yet on this sunny afternoon, far away from the Colorado mountains in which I spent so much time as a kid, I felt a guilty sense of relief that I’d stumbled into the life I was living. If I’d suddenly found ski fame in my teens, would I still have done so much internal exploring, self-educating, and soul-searching? Would I still have ended up in politics? Would I still have met my partner, Erin, and would we still be living happily in London?

By the traditional legal metrics, I’m the same person today I was in the past. That’s true for most of us. Yet moments of nostalgia can make us feel thoroughly disloyal to our former selves. We think we’ve always been who we are today, right now, until an unanticipated glimpse of the past, perhaps triggered by a flood of memories from a forgotten chapter, tells us that’s not true. It reminds us that past us, current us, and future us are inseparable, but not identical. It shows us that we’re continually redefining ourselves. What matters to us today may not matter to us tomorrow, and what mattered before may be irrelevant or even antithetical to who we are today. And even if an activity or person or place doesn’t really concern us anymore, the fact that it once mattered means something.

Our future-obsessed culture, which expects us to constantly strive for and focus on the next potential achievement, makes these nostalgic realizations even more bewildering. We rarely carve out time to reflect on our own evolution, so it’s startling to have thrust into our consciousness such a vivid reminder of the methodical passage of time. Even though nostalgia is driven by the past, it forces us into the present with a heavy dose of raw self-awareness. It takes us out, however briefly, of our minute-by-minute march forward of plans and tasks and to-do lists. It makes us reflect on how much living we’ve done, and how quickly and subtly it can slip away. Nostalgia reminds us, at once, of the impossibly long and impossibly short nature of life.

There are different types of nostalgia. The sentiment I’m describing here is distinct from the yearning for a mythical past that plagues much of Western politics today. As an American former congressional staffer living and working in the United Kingdom, large parts of the two political worlds I inhabit have been taken hostage by this desire to turn back the societal clock. These movements are born of frustration and buoyed by grievance and resentment. The nostalgia I’m describing, on the other hand, is more individual and generally more unpredictable. It’s not a way of imagining how the world might once have been but rather a reminder of who we used to be. It’s more likely to make us smile wistfully than retweet something angrily. It’s both happy and sad, bitter and sweet.

In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, the writer Daniel H. Pink observes that “meaningful endings” — of a book or movie, say, but really of any experience — are rooted in “one of the most complex emotions humans experience: poignancy, a mix of happiness and sadness.” All of us have painful memories, some more difficult or traumatic than others. There may be chapters we don’t want or aren’t ready to confront. But we’re all constantly evolving as human beings so, like it or not, from time to time everyone will encounter poignant reminders that take us back to an earlier version of ourselves.

Over the past few years, my grandfather, Seymour, has been exploring these moments through a series of essays. One tells the story of January 20, 1965, when he and a friend managed to get tickets to an inaugural ball commemorating Lyndon Johnson’s swearing-in. Somehow, Grandpa Sy found himself seated at a dinner table next to Omar Bradley, the five-star Army general and World War II hero. In the piece, Sy reflects on how he’d completely forgotten about that night until bumping into an old friend earlier in the day brought it back to the surface. “It may be true what I have read,” he writes. “The mind works like a computer. Long-forgotten memories come forth if you punch the right key.”

Awareness practices like mindfulness meditation have helped me appreciate the power of recognizing and sitting with complicated sentiments, rather than trying to bury or fix them. Just as Grandpa Seymour did when he rediscovered that memorable evening in Washington, D.C., I’ve been trying to dive more deeply into nostalgia whenever it hits. One time, for instance, I was driving through Summit County, Colorado, and heard aspen leaves rustling on the trees. I was immediately taken back in time to summer days hiking with my family and trying to jump off things on bikes with my brother. For a few extra moments, I made a conscious effort to hold on to these complex feelings, as well as the steering wheel of the car.

Another time, nostalgia nearly overwhelmed me on a work trip to LEGO headquarters in Denmark. Like a lot of kids, I was once obsessed with LEGOs. Seeing these toys again reopened chapters in my life I hadn’t thought about in twenty years. Being surrounded by the memories they sparked was like seeing a long-lost friend whose presence reminds us how much we changed. Like skiing, LEGOs were once central to my life, but I didn’t consciously decide not to think about them anymore. I just stopped. Grew up. Moved on. Moved out. I’m sure I didn’t know it at the time, but there was a day when I played with my last LEGO before I put the toys away. There was a time when I thought my last thought about them before they were filed away in my mental archives. And then, two decades later, these memories came flooding back into the present.

How do we reconcile our former, current, and future selves? How do we build lives in which we appreciate the present? How do we confront the inevitable passage of time in an honest way? How do we recognize the majesty of living without being overwhelmed by the fear of it being taken away? How do we cultivate awareness of who, or what, we love, while also preparing for the possibility of loss and finality? These questions don’t have easy answers, or even answers at all. But we explore them anyway because the quest itself makes our lives richer and more meaningful.

Every time nostalgia forces these questions into our consciousness, momentarily pushing aside the countless other short-term things we’re working on and worried about, we’re given an opportunity. Whether it’s a fond memory or a painful one, when we get an unexpected text message that punches the right key, we can embrace the complicated unknowns. We can step back from the nonstop rush of our busy lives. We can sit with nostalgia, and even if it’s for just a moment, we can see where it takes us.

This column was originally published in the Medium publication ‘The Startup.’