Carla DiBello On The Real Meaning Of Nostalgia And How It Shapes Our Thinking
The entrepreneur and celebrity style insider on the deceptive and sometimes detrimental side of nostalgia
Nostalgia. Just reading or saying the word sends a warmth through the body that floods the nervous system, smoothing furrowed brows and relaxing muscles we didn’t even know were tense. It casts everything within its grasp in a romantic hue, rose gold and inviting. What is it about nostalgia that puts everything in the rearview in soft focus, beckoning to us as we travel further and further away from it?
Nostalgia is defined as ‘a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.’ Simplified, it is a way of remembering things – recalling a time or place in its best light, while allowing a hazy cloud of remembrance to hide the cracks that fade from our memory. Meanwhile, the cracks of our present remain clear as day. Due to practicality, when I moved to Dubai, I was only able to bring a small number of my possessions along with me. And yet, there were still a handful of items that, while fairly useless in my new surroundings, I could not bear to leave behind. As time passed by, those items remained tucked away in an unused drawer, doing nothing but collecting dust.
Nostalgia will do that to you. It will convince you to cling to things that you’re convinced you still need. And it can be intensely persuasive. If you let it, it will fill your drawers, your home, and your mind with objects, ideas, emotions, and ways of seeing that no longer apply, until you are so inundated with the past that you cannot see the present, let alone fathom the future.
And while a good amount of energy has been spent on the benefits of lightening up in a Marie Kondo sort of way, most of this talk has been central to material objects and the impact they have on our well-being. But when we hoard feelings, as we tend to do when wallowing within nostalgia, it can perhaps be even more harmful.
The mind is deceiving. How easily we forget the hardships that we have endured in the past, somehow convinced that they were not nearly as bad as those currently in front of us. And how easily we forget that one day, the present will be a moment in our lives that we may look back upon with that same wistfulness, wishing for it with a nostalgic pang in our hearts. There is a quote from Osho that speaks to this.
“The mind is just like dust gathered on a mirror. The more dust gathers, the less the mirror is mirror-like. And if the layer of dust is very thick, the mirror does not reflect at all. Everybody gathers dust, and not only do you gather, you cling to it, you think it is a treasure. But the past is gone. And if you cling to the past and you think it is a treasure… your future cannot be anything but your modified past.”
That’s not to say that fondly remembering the past is terrible. It’s a beautiful thing to love where we came from. The past is by all means the foundation upon which today’s version of ourselves was built and therefore, we should hold gratitude for our past. Joyful memories make us stronger. But as Osho says, if we cling to nostalgia, we run the risk of living a modified version of our past – and nothing more. And considering that a living thing is defined as that which grows and changes, there is a certain death of the soul that comes from reliving a past on repeat.
To return to the metaphor of hoarding not only emotions but memories also, I am again reminded of Marie Kondo’s methods. In order to relinquish, it is imperative that we first honour that which no longer serves us – that we give thanks to how the past shaped us so that we may mark the end of our time with it. It is only in facing the mirror that we see the dust for what it is and begin the process of clearing it away so that we may once again clearly see ourselves.
Photography: Efraim Evidor. Styling: Imogene Legrand.
Carla Wears: Jumpsuit, Dhs7,600, Michael Kors. Shoes, Dhs4,065, Amina Muaddi. Hair: Sisters Beauty Lounge. Make-up: Sarah Saya.
With Thanks To Five Palm Jumeirah
From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s March 2023 issue.