During the pandemic the company I work for had a psychologist talk to us over zoom with some tips for battling stress and depression. Most of his suggestions I had heard before. Eat well, get lots of sleep, exercise. But there was one tip that he suggested that I had never heard before and it’s easier than all the others: practicing nostalgia.
This NYU shrink said it’s been shown through studies to make people feel better. I dug up an oldish article in the NY Times that corroborates this.
I tried it today. It kind of made me happy. It also made me cry. Watch this video and then I’ll explain.
Home Town Japan
That video is the song “Furosato” by the Funky Monkey Babys, a Japanese pop band.
Japanese culture is very big on nostalgia. The word “Natsukashii” means a feeling of nostalgia and it’s used often. Everytime an old song comes up or a snack comes out that someone remembers eating when they were a kid people will exclaim “Natsukashii!”
Japanese people often also feel intense nostalgia for their hometowns back in the countryside. Because of the depopulating countryside, it’s very common for people in cities to long for their idyllic childhoods in rural Japan. There are songs about hometowns, and a common old song is Furosato.
When I lived in Japan and my son was 8 years old, we lived in a Totoro-like eden with a white castle on the mountain overlooking green rice fields. Our son walked to and from school with a group of buddies. They’d often catch bugs or frogs, climb trees, and generally just run around together forming those intense friendships that happen when you’re six years old. Remember that? Happy times. Fun to remember. Sad to remember.
That video I shared tells the story of young country kids being pals and then moving away to toil in the city as salarymen, longing to see home again, and then reuniting. This video cuts off at the end which is just as well because I’m already a shivering wreck by the end.
Here’s the thing: that video played on our television every single morning as we were starting our day and our son was the age of those young boys. Now our son is in college and I miss him incredibly. So the actual music video about the nostalgia of leaving a rural Japanese childhood behind is entwined with my experience of watching my son leave his childhood in rural Japan behind. It’s an ouroboros of nostalgia.
Writing this story for you has forced me to practice nostalgia, and I do feel better than I did when I began. But I also feel a deep ache inside. I think aching inside is part of being alive. Not everyone feels it, but if you do then you know.
So here’s your Free Life Coach prescription: Go listen to an old song that reminds you of happy times and sit with the joy/pain of being a living, breathing human. Share the song in the comments if you like. I’d love to hear it.
“Kind and generous” by Natalie Merchant, we played it at my dads funeral 22 years ago and to this day I will sob when I hear it.
This might sound silly, but every once in a while I’ll dig up intro’s to old cartoons that I used to watch in the early 80’s when I was a kid. Three theme songs always take me back. Spider-man and his Amazing Friends. Kidd Video. And Saturday Supercade. This was back when life was simple. No internet, no cell phones. Just my brother and a couple neighbor boys from two doors down and we would ride our bikes all over town, play in the woods behind our house, reading comic books, waiting until school was out for the summer and we were free to roam. Life was grand.