#133 - What If Nostalgia Is a Map? {Reflections}

Nostalgia can sneak up on you and suddenly you’re missing a version of life you can’t actually return to. After a weekend back in Colorado with old friends, I find myself asking why the “olden days” can feel so magnetic in midlife, and why trying to recreate them would only feel hollow. That tension opens the door to a better question: what am I really longing for?

We lean on Jungian analyst James Hollis and his powerful reframing of the midlife crisis as the summons of the soul. The restlessness isn’t proof you failed. It may be a sign you’re right on schedule. We unpack how the first half of life often builds a functional self: responsibility, career, family, stability, survival. Then something shifts. The second half of life asks for the true self, the parts of you that got set aside because you had to be practical and reliable.

From there, we get concrete about what helps and what hurts. Going backward doesn’t work: chasing old identities, chasing old relationships, chasing the feelings you had at 18. What does work is retrieval, moving forward while bringing back what you left behind. Creativity, play, courage, adventure, freedom, a sense of possibility. We also touch the spiritual language that echoes this inner change: letting go of false selves, becoming new, and learning to listen to what your soul is asking for rather than numbing it away.

If you’ve felt anxious, restless, or quietly unfinished, press play and sit with the question: what part of you did you leave behind that’s asking to come home? Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s feeling the midlife pull, and leave a review so more people can find the conversation.

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Transcript

Colorado Trip And Old Longings

SPEAKER_00 0:15

What is up, everybody? Hey, this is Ryan. Welcome to our Reflections Podcast. And hey, I was in Colorado last weekend. I went snowboarding with some buddies of mine and they're old friends of mine from my early YWAM days. Shout out to Chris Black who listens to our podcast. And um yeah, it was awesome. I love it. But one of the things I've noticed is that I'm 46 years old, and like that part of my life that, you know, growing up out there was a while ago, but more so recently, whenever I go back, I get this sense inside of me that like I just sort of have this longing for those olden days, like whether it was high school, kind of doing some things with my buddies from high school or playing lacrosse in high school, which it was a long time ago. Like, let's be honest. I was, you know, I'm 46, so it's you know, 20 some 20 plus years, 28 years ago. And or all these things, or even my old YWM days, I just love I I have this like almost like this nostalgia to like go back and recapture something from back then. And it's kind of odd because I don't know if I want to time travel back then. I mean, that'd be kind of fun just to kind of check it out, but I'm not sure I, you know, that I I want that. Like if I were to go back and like get all my old buddies from my old, you know, my old days together and go back to some of the old stomping grounds we used to hang out in, and we tried to reenact those moments now, it'd be weird. Like that's weird. And it it would not be the same. I get that. So, like, what's the deal? Like, what why do I have these longings? And maybe you've had this moment where like you're maybe my age or younger, maybe a bit older, and you like have this desire to just to go back and like recapture something, uh, like maybe a feeling you had when you were younger. And maybe it isn't to like look younger, although that might be kind of cool, or to live in the old apartment you lived in when you were younger, drive an old car you drove in, uh, maybe, but it's maybe something else. Like, I don't know. Maybe it's like I have this longing to feel this sense of energy or like possibility or even like innocence or freedom that I had back when I was younger. And maybe that's it, you know. Like I oftentimes we call this the midlife crisis, and who knows when midlife is even anymore, because people live so long now. Midlife could be 30, it could be 40, it could be 50, who knows? But and many times people in their midlife crisis, you know, it's sort of this proverbial term in the culture. Maybe these men or women will like because they have this sense of like recapturing the past, they'll go buy a car with a you know convertible top into a red corvette to try to recapture their youth, or they'll buy the car they had when they were younger. Maybe they'll call the old girlfriend the old prom date from when they were a kid, or crack out the old football cleats from when they were in high school and they were like the all-state running back or whatever. But James Hollis says, no, this actual feeling, this sense of like trying to like this longing for the olden days is actually totally normal. So if you felt that, like you know, in your 40s, 50s or 30s, or whatever, you're not broken. Um, actually, according to this Jungian and analyst named James Hollis, who wrote a great book called Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Your Life, he says you actually might be right on schedule. Because he says what we often call a midlife crisis is is not a crisis at all. Because we think maybe in the midlife stage, and if you haven't gotten there yet, just hang tight because it might come. Or if you've gone through it, like you think, man, am I something wrong with me? Like, what am I broken? But he calls it not a midlife crisis, he calls it the summons of the soul. Oh man, I love that. The summons of the soul. So the soul is like summoning you, like beckoning you, inviting you to something different and new. He also calls it the insurgency of the soul. I love it. It's basically your your deeper self is saying, hey, the life that you've built that got you here to midlife, it's a good life. You know, you got a family and kids, maybe you got a job and uh you built the thing, the empire, or the but this might not be the life that you need to kind of carry you forward. Like something might need to change, like there's a summons of your soul. And here's the idea: what's really happening here is when people feel like they want to recapture their youth, it's not really about youth because you can't do it. Rather, I mean, if if it and if it was just that, it'd be tragic. Because like you can't, you literally cannot go backwards. So if you're if you were just longing, in fact, the word nostalgia comes from these two words that literally mean like homecoming and pain. And nostalgia was first experienced like this longing for home. That was like a pain that was so tragic that made people sick. And so nostalgia initially was actually a negative thing to experience because you can't go back home. You can't go back and recapture the past despite what Gatsby thinks that he can do. And uh, so it's not about just you know youth. Rather, what James Hollis says in his book, it's awesome. He says this longing, the summons of the soul is about something that your youth represented for you. And so, I don't know, what did what did you what did you like about being young? Um, what things about being younger do you miss? Like maybe your youth meant for you, like freedom, or taking risk, or creativity, or maybe adventure, or like being less controlled by people's expectations, or I don't know, feeling more alive, you know? And somewhere along the way, usually for good and understandable reasons, parts of us, like, and maybe these parts got set aside because you can't take a lot of risk when you're building a family or you know, or like trying to make money, make ends meet. And uh, not because we failed, you know, but it's because we had to survive. And we had to build our careers, we had to raise some kids, you had to be responsible, you had to show up on time to not lose your job, and uh, you had to pay a mortgage, you had to be responsible for many of us, and you had to be what the world needed you to be. And fair enough, it's how you got to where you are now, and that's how you survived and did a good job and were able to afford the car that the four tourists that you bought, you know, not the portion on 11 twin turbo. And so Hollis says that there's actually two halves of our lives, the first half of our life, in which you're doing these things, you're building a foundational container to live your life. It's it's about responsibility and duty and taking care of these things. And then there's the second half of life, and maybe there's a transition in between that has to be had or made, because the first half, he would argue, is not at all like the second half of life. The first half is about building this functional self, this container. The second half of life, though, is about exploring, not the functional self, but the true self. Yeah, the first half is like building the container, this functional self, like getting along, going along to get along. The second half, though, is about exploring the true you. And here's a shift: the shift comes into that middle life. Uh, and there has to be a shift. If not, you'll never transition to that second half of life, and something in you will die. But sometimes, and this is where he like gets clinical, I love it, that shift feels like a longing or a nostalgia, a desire to recapture the past or a restlessness, or this strange sense that something inside of you is not finished, or it doesn't work anymore. Like something's not right. I got I can't tell. Maybe you feel maybe a little bit anxious or maybe a bit of depression in there. So, what do you do? Well, if you're in the first half of life listening to this podcast, if you're like 40 or younger, I'm just telling you, hey, live your first half of life. Go out there and live, build, grind, you know, get a job, work long hours, and you know, have a family and build an empire and earn money and just you know, build that fun like go head first into that functional life and and do all the things. But if you're in that middle of life and you feel this longing, um, or maybe you're you're in your second half of life and you just never really address this longing, uh, and you feel this pull, this summons of the soul, uh, when you feel that, uh, there's two things you can do. One of them doesn't work and one does work. Here's the one that doesn't work. When you feel the longing to be young again, you can try to literally go backwards. This doesn't work. It doesn't work at all. You can go back and buy the Corvette and go onto Facebook. Of course, it's Facebook, not Instagram, because you know, for the younger kids, middle life will be Instagram or whatever. But for us in our 40s, Facebook, you can go and try to find your old prom date. You can drag out your old football uniform and put it on and try to impress your neighbors, you know, and it's goofy. And it does, it doesn't work. You can you're gonna give up, you're gonna give up your whole empire that you that you just built uh to go uh meet your old high school prom date. Like it's sort of we know from the outset how goofy this is. Or you can sit around and you can tell stories of days gone by, you know, and drink whiskey and just wax eloquent about how cool you were in high school. And people do this. You can try to relive this past version of yourself, and often this will lead to impulsive decisions, identity shifts, uh chasing feelings as opposed to meaning, and it doesn't work. Uh and this second half of life is not a healthy one. So here's the other thing you can do. This one does work. You can, as opposed to going back, you can you can simply uh he called James Hollis calls it retrieval. You can go forward, but with some things that you left behind. So you can ask, hey, what new things need to be born in in my life or in me for this next 40, 50 years of my life? And what were the things that I left behind in my youth that I want to recapture that my soul is asking me to recapture? So maybe it's creativity, maybe it's playfulness. Maybe when you were younger, you used to be playful and creative and you let all that go and you left it behind because you had to get a job and be responsible. Maybe it's courage, maybe it's risk taking. Um, maybe you left parts of you, your personality that didn't fit the life you had to build and you left them behind. And maybe those are parts of you that want to come back online. See, midlife, James Hollis says it's not, it's or rather, it's when the psyche sort of asks you, hey, are you ready to become more fully yourself now? Are you ready to become more fully who you're supposed to be? So this midlife is not a decline, it isn't a crisis, it's it's it's potential depth and newness, a truer life. Now, there's spiritual language to all this too. Like there's in the Bible, and I'm not saying the Bible is really teaching about this kind of psychological phenomenon, but the Bible uses language like this, like dying to your old self, being made new. There's all this image about true self, false self, and letting go of false identities and attachments to things that just don't work. You know, being transformed from one for sort of glory to the another. Okay, here's the thing though. So Hollis suggests that this anxiety that we feel, this restlessness, this, you know, maybe it's depression, maybe it's like this nostalgia, it's not something to eliminate. Like, don't try to get rid of it. Um, don't try to hit the bottle and drink it away or numb out or check out. Uh instead, it's something to listen to. What's down there? What is your soul asking of you? What things do you need to bring back online and to move forward, not to go backwards, but to move forward. Because look, all these things kind of show up when the life we're living and the life we're meant to live start drifting apart. And so, what's the life that's like begging to be lived in you that you can sort of bring back online? Yeah, so maybe the question isn't uh maybe it's not like how do I go back? Maybe the question is more what part of me did I leave behind back there that's now asking to come home? Because this is the invitation and the summons of the soul to a better, second half, not better, but to a more robust and vibrant second half of your life. What needs to be born in you for this next part of your life? All right, love you guys. Peace. Hey, if you enjoy this show, I'd love to have you share it with some friends. And don't forget you are always welcome to join us in person at Central in Elk River at 8 30, which is our liturgical gathering, or at 10 o'clock, our modern gathering. Or you can check us out online at clcelkriver.org. Peace.