Visit, don't live there

The past is for going back to. Wildschut's studies said so, and I believe them, and this chapter is about going back in the way that does the work and not in the way that ends in the sigh.

Choose it. A visit starts with a decision. Put the record on, get the album out, ring the friend who was there. Living there starts with a trigger and a drift. The difference in the first second decides how it ends, because a chosen visit has a purpose and a drift doesn't.

Take someone. Wildschut's finding was that nostalgia does its best work socially, connecting you to the people in the memory and, I'd add, to the person you're remembering with. Go back with the friend who was there, or tell someone who wasn't. "Let me tell you about that summer." The story told to a person is a visit. The images run alone in the car are living there.

Take the whole record. Tell the story with the rent in it. "We were completely broke and Sam was in love with that awful man and we went to the beach anyway." That's a better story and a truer one and it gives the people in it their problems back, which is chapter 19's whole point. The golden version makes for a short story. The whole record makes for a good one.

Give it an end. A visit is over when the record finishes or the story's told. Then you come forward. If you find yourself still there an hour later, in the third replay of the same afternoon, you've stopped visiting.

Come back with one thing. As you come forward, say one thing about today that's good. Not to be positive. To carry the visit's warmth into the year that can use it, which is the way back that Wildschut's participants made and the sigh doesn't. "That was a good summer, and this one has the allotment in it." That's the whole difference between a visit and living there, in one sentence, at the door.

Watch for the low-mood visit. Wildschut's triggers were low mood and loneliness. When you notice you've gone back on a grey Sunday without deciding to, that's information about the Sunday, not about nineteen ninety-six. The answer is often a person, now, rather than a person then, and the phone is closer than the album.