Nostalgia comes too easy this time of year.
There’s something about the holidays and the coming of winter and the flipping of the calendar that brings out the sentimentalist in all of us. And if you’re already prone to romantic thinking, the yearning can be almost too much to bear.
In these days where remembering and rewinding seem to happen instinctively, we so easily find ourselves looking back and we find ourselves longing.
No matter how content and how blessed we might feel where we are, homesickness happens to us all, the virus just takes on different strains.
Sometimes we’re homesick for a Where.
Our minds drift to a geographic place where we felt most ourselves. It may be the house where we grew up or the town where we lived our teenage years or somewhere we only spent a brief but beautiful season as an adult. For whatever the reason, our sense of peace often has a specific address.
Places have their own light, their own color, their own scents; their unique speed and energy and sounds, and when we think about that place or we’re in that place, we just feel Home.
Sometimes we’re homesick for a When.
The yearning for us when this sickness hits, isn’t for a spot on the map but a moment in time. We rewind back in our minds to the year, to the day, perhaps to the very second when life was sweetest; when things just made sense, when the peace and joy we often try so hard to manufacture during these holidays, simply was.
So many times in my childhood, I can remember be overtaken by the assurance that life was good. I can recall vividly what it was like to just rest in being alive and being loved, and believing that everything was always going to be OK. So often in my worried, hectic, grieving grown-up now, I miss being in that gentle, soft, comforting, innocent then.
Sometimes we’re homesick for a Who.
The older we get and the more time we’re here, the more seasons we endure without people who gave both our holidays and our ordinary days such meaning. The empty places at the table, the phone calls we don’t get, and the loved ones we’ve lost, all get magnified now. The grief expands and the pain gets compounded.
When everything in us and around this time of year; when the songs and the commercials and the stories all remind us over and over of the true blessings of family and friends, it seems to only highlight the gaping absence of those we love. We all want to go home, and in those heartsick moments home is a person.
Sometimes we’re homesick for our former selves.
There’s an earlier version of ourselves that we often envy during the holidays. Not simply a younger, healthier, more attractive us (though that’s certainly is part of it), but a version of us that had something that we’ve since lost. We look back and remember seeing with different eyes, we remember holding a more secure hope, we see ourselves as more positive and full of wonder and dreams and plans—and we want that self back badly.
We miss the us that laughed easily and danced without care and exploded with possibility; the past version of ourselves that we most want to be now.
Your variety of seasonal melancholy may be different but the result is the same. It’s a bittersweet yearning that can only come with both the experience of something wonderful and the realization that it’s no longer quite as wonderful.
Wherever you may be reading this, I guess I just wanted to encourage your homesick heart and to invite you even to celebrate it.
As painful and difficult as it is to be missing something or someone or sometime so very deeply, it is a reminder that you have held it, that you have had them, that you have been there. Your profound sadness, your terrible longing, and your tearful nostalgia in the present, are proof of the goodness of your journey on the way here.
Homesickness is indeed a difficult, sometimes cruel companion during the holidays, but it’s one you should welcome warmly.
You could only really experience it, because you’ve once felt what it’s like to truly be Home.
