Nostalgia’s Surprising Wisdom

For years, aging barely crossed my mind. It belonged to people settled into a different season of life, while I was absorbed in working, raising children, and tending to what was right in front of me. I never imagined how slowly, and yet how suddenly this season would one day become my own.

Living in a culture that prizes productivity and prominence, it is easy to see aging as diminishment. Roles change. Energies shift. Life begins to move in different rhythms, sometimes by choice and sometimes by necessity. The unspoken assumption is that our most meaningful years are behind us.

My faith tells me otherwise.

I believe that our later years are not a winding down of purpose, but a deepening of it. God calls us differently at each stage of life, and every stage belongs to the larger story. None is less or more important than the other.

One of the ways I hear God’s call differently now is through nostalgia. I notice this as I drive the streets of Los Angeles. The city keeps changing around me, and with each change I feel a tender longing for what once defined the boundaries of my life. On one corner, I pass a housing complex where a coffee shop I once frequented used to stand. On another, I drive by a repurposed mall that once served as a kind of main street, a gathering place for children, friends, and everyday errands.

Alongside the places, faces come to mind. Parents of my children’s friends, once part of my everyday life and now out of reach. Friends and neighbors who left to create new lives in other cities. Members of my own family and my parish family who are no longer living. I miss them all.

One lesson nostalgia is teaching me is attentiveness.

Since familiar connections may slip away, I can no longer rely on habit or routine. I must notice where I am, who I am becoming, and how God is grounding me now.

Another lesson nostalgia teaches is humility.

It reminds me that much of who I am was formed through relationships I did not create on my own. I was shaped by people, places, and moments that were given to me rather than earned. Their absence reveals how deeply I depended on them, and how little control I actually had.

Nostalgia is also teaching me something about hope.

Hope, I am learning, is the calm belief that profound meaning is still unfolding. It asks me to stop searching for meaning in the same places, and to remain open to where it is being revealed to me now.

As I stay open in this way, nostalgia begins to teach me something about purpose as well.

I am learning that purpose does not lessen with age. It simply changes its voice. My sense of purpose is shifting from doing to being, from striving to abiding. I am learning to offer presence instead of performance, attention instead of accomplishment, compassion instead of control.

While many who are aging carry the quiet question, do our lives still matter, I am learning that they do in ways I could not have understood before. My life holds deep meaning, not in spite of age, but because of it. Perhaps this is the ultimate gift of a long life, to grow into a meaning that can only be recognized at the end of many seasons.