Spring Nostalgia

                For all my life, spring has been my chosen season. The numbness of winter gradually fades from our fingers, and we are overcome by a new energy, a new zeal for life that we forgot in the cold months. Songbirds return and the land becomes green. We remember, with an aching nostalgia that pains us to our bones, the great task of living, the enormous adventure of making life an adventure. How did we forget something so simple? How did the winter so ensnare us, so benumb us to the joy of every breath, that we forgot even that warmth, that light, that green and newness were possible? The April air makes us simple again, joyful again, courageous again; but even April air brings its own tender pain.

                We feel already, listening to the happy sprinkling spring showers, a distant echo of next year’s winter. By June we have forgotten about cold, but in April we feel the last icicles melting in our veins. I wonder if we feel nostalgic in the spring because there is still enough of ice in us that we can truly, deeply feel the flood of time flowing past. The birds sing, the grass grows green and strong, spring flowers light upon trees, shoots, and bushes. New life and youth shine all around us. Perhaps for the first time in his life, a boy of twenty-three can look about himself and truly feel himself young, a boy who at ten was called an eighty-year-old man.

                Spring is the time of youth, the season of new projects, new thoughts, new beginnings. Yet spring is also the time of the sweet tender ache, the time when we recall that each budding bloom will wither by next fall. We who feel ourselves young again know that ache, that lovely, urgent, beautiful ache, that overwhelming desire to taste the whole of life, to embrace life, to live! Even in our headlong rush toward new horizons, new situations, new and ever more demanding challenges, we feel the chilly breath of winter and death. This is the nostalgia of spring and youth, the sweet pain of the certainty that youth is fleeting, the liberating responsibility of ensuring that youth must not be wasted.

                There is no paradox in saying that youth already knows its own kind of nostalgia. What, after all, is nostalgia? Is it not the keen awareness of the frailty of our grasp, a profound realization of our ultimate powerlessness against time? Life, for each of us, encounters us as a well of possibility, and our moments of nostalgia are those when we feel in our hearts, viscerally, that the well is drying up. What a horror! With each moment that slips our grasp we lose one instant of possibility, we’ve converted that much open futurity into fixed past. Why should we have to be old to know nostalgia? We can already feel a nostalgia for the present moment, which has turned to memory by the time we notice it.

                There exists a way of thinking that would have us believe that because time is, in an ultimate sense, out of our hands, the best policy is to lie low and let life’s storm pass. Best not to become too attached to a life you will inevitably be deprived of, says this attitude. Do not seek too much, do not attempt too much, do not set your sights too high, they say. This is the life-strategy of “Don’t rock the boat.” Be glad, be thankful for home, for work, home, health, friends, family, and a quiet life. Do not tempt the gods by striving for the infinite.

                There is much to be said for this way of thinking; among these things is the fact that such a life is utterly unnatural.

                Every one of us was conceived in the spring tide, one of millions of pilgrims swimming for the invisible shore that would become our other half. None of us remembers this struggle. Our first step in life was no step at all, but a swim. In that primordial swim you, yes you, reader, beat out millions upon millions of your fellows, striving without promises, without assurances, for the bare right to exist. You did not doubt then that this life, this precious chance at life, was worth every effort, every cleverness, every iota of energy. Why do you doubt it now?

                It’s no good to say, “I don’t know if life is worthwhile. I didn’t ask to be here.” You did more than ask, reader. Do not dare insult your former self, the millions of possible selves you took the place of, by giving up when the road seems hard.

                Spring has arrived, and we are giddy with the energy of the season. If we wouldn’t be ashamed of ourselves when we close our eyes the last time, we must dare to set goals that seem impossible. We must take the first step of the proverbial journey of a thousand miles. We must stop trying to shield ourselves from the world, stop trying to live like abstract beings, and above all we must accept and revel in the fact that we are physical beings with physical bodies. Fear is no excuse for inaction. Prudence is no guarantee of safety. We are each living under a death sentence, and the blow may come at any moment. There is no such thing as a safe place. There is no reason not to be on the move.