DisIdentification with Cheerfulness

This morning, I am feeling blah, just kind of lethargic and uninterested and mildly gloomy. As I casually worked in the kitchen, I said to myself, "I just don't feel like myself today."

Luckily, I caught myself and thought, "That doesn't make sense. You are obviously yourself right now. Say a more realistic thing." The true thing is that I usually feel cheerful and interested in many things and excited to start my day and motivated about the work I will do in it. But I also sometimes feel less cheerful, even morose. I feel a variety of things, and none of them define my identity in some fixed way. My identity (if it even makes sense to talk about it, not sure yet) is constantly in flux. Sometimes I feel one thing, sometimes another.

What I was practicing was disintentification--not defining myself by one characteristic, cheerfulness, and calling another characteristic alien. I was practicing not categorizing every experience (my own experiences!) as me or not me.

Why does it matter? I have a habit, one that is shared by many people, I think, of deciding what I am and assuming that I will always be that. I tend to imagine that there is some unchanging essence that is my core, my unchanging self. I don't actually think that belief tracks with the evidence. My personality has shifted in subtle and in obvious ways. My beliefs and values have changed. My emotions change, not just in the moment; over time, the proportions, intensity, and physical manifestations of my emotions have changed. I can't imagine what the core of me could possibly be beyond these things that obviously change.

When these changes happen, my feeling that the changes are wrong somehow, unnatural, catastrophic, that they mean a painful shift to being an entirely new person with a new identity that must be understood (because it too must be fixed) causes me a lot of pain and suffering, the suffering of not actually believing and acting on a true thing. If my identity cannot be nailed down in this fixed way, being out of sync with that truth would of course cause me distress. It's not fun when the things that happen are not in accordance with one's model of reality, especially when we don't change the model as quick as may be.

So this morning, I worked on my model. I disidentified with cheerfulness, reminded myself that I feel many things, embraced a melancholy mood as a part of myself, and looked impermanence squarely in the face. And because thinking in accordance with the actual evidence is so pleasurable, I feel a little bit more cheerful.

Thoughts About Nostalgia and Impermanence

Here are some things about me:

I have a playlist for things that make me nostalgic called "Seventeen and Terminally Fey," named after a song that reminds me of this mindset.
I felt nostalgia, even as a child, even for things that were still present.
I recognize that all the things in the world are impermanent, meaning they are constantly in flux, and I try very hard to behave as if that true fact is really true.
I love and own a memento mori called Ozymandius, King of Kings.
I consider myself a disciple of Epicurus, or even more accurately maybe, a Lucretian.

I've always identified nostalgia as a thing I frequently experience. When I learned in an elementary Greek class that "algia" meant pain and "nost" came from the root for a return home, I felt that warm delight of an accurate description of something you've been toying with for a while. I have ALWAYS from my earliest memories had the feeling of a bittersweet longing for some past home. Perhaps the reason is that I grew up steeped in literature from the past, and I was raised in and around and among a set of family memories that became mine, though I didn't experience them.

What I've never quite understood is why this nostalgic experience is both painful and highly pleasurable at the same time. Other people describe nostalgia as homesickness, but my experience is not frightened and empty, but tender and lovely and blooming. And then I read this status update this week on Facebook:

"When you’re with your spouse, significant other, a good friend or a close relative, picture the moment, in all its mundane detail, as if you’re looking back on it from a point in life where that person is no longer around. No need to imagine any upsetting explanations for their absence; the part of your life that includes that special person is simply over, and you are happy to have been with them while your lives overlapped.

Observe them as if you’ve been shipped back from the future, to see them once again on an ordinary day, with absolutely no reason to take it for granted. To do this you only have to recognize the moments in which you’re with another person you know and love — and for most people these happen constantly.

Then consciously take a step back, and watch the moment as if it’s a memory. There’s no feeling like it when something ordinary is happening, and everyone’s being ordinary, and yet in your private mental space you’re seeing it all from way down the road, after these wonderful people are gone.

An ordinary moment, adorned with such irreplaceable people, is so rich and perfect that you’d give anything to be right back in the middle of it. And then you realize that you are."

Cain, David (2013-09-12). This Will Never Happen Again (Kindle Locations 241-250). Thought Catalog. Kindle Edition."

This opened up a new way for me to look at my experience of nostalgia. I use it as a tool of present moment awareness. This moment that I am inhabiting now is precious to me because I know that it will be a memory in the next second. The moment is impermanent, and I will never have a chance again to experience it exactly like now. It will be changed because everything is in flux. I will have better moments and worse moments, and the things I love right this second may be dearer to me or less dear. But right now will never be alive again.

Watching Aaron on his laptop will soon inhabit the same space as memories that I feel belong to me but really were only told second hand to my grandmother. And so the moment of watching Aaron has two layers, almost in sync but not quite. He is, at once, vivid and alive and in this moment, and shadowy and faded soft like watercolor in the past.

So for nostalgia, the pain is passing away of the present moment, but the pleasure is in seeing the beauty of moments that have passed out of being. I always wondered why this is so easy for me to feel pleasure in, and maybe the secret is in my upbringing. I was taught to love and delight in the past, to feel its presence in my real life, to superimpose the past onto the present. And then I went and became all focused on the present moment and the past came with it, teaching me to shift between them with a little squint to change my visual focus.