Muppet Nostalgia Medicine
Gareth Higgins on THE MEDICINE OF NOSTALGIA
This past week I’ve been immersed in nostalgia for the movies of my childhood. A new Muppet show dropped, it turned out to be fantastic, and I am as happy as a frog on a lilypad. It hasn’t merely been fun to revisit my favorite childhood characters, but I’ve been undergoing something deeper. Whether or not you like the Muppets, nostalgia for things that meant goodness to us when we were children can be authentically transformational. (And if you don’t like the Muppets, try watching The Muppet Movie and The Dark Crystal with an open mind, treating them as if they were as meaningful as anything written by Mark Twain or Ursula K. le Guin respectively; let me know what happens.) What I’m about to say may be as true for whatever stories and characters opened up your childhood heart to imagination, adventure, compassion, connection, feeling seen and understood. Muppets assemble in my particular nostalgia pantheon along with the Goonies, Back to the Future, Tootsie, The Fox and the Hound - and that’s just the movies; there’s music and books too, of course, not to mention people and places. But a litany of my particular favorites isn’t as useful as exploring the question of what we might call re-membering does, where nostalgia not only calls to mind things we once loved, but brings back those loves into the field of our experience today. (Though I’d love to hear from you about your own nostalgia for movies that meant something to you as a child - so consider this a wholehearted invitation to comment below.)
Nostalgia can be medicine, calling us back to a sense of wonder and wellbeing, and the meaning that comes from the belief that we can actually (co-)create things. And nostalgia can be poison, stirring up feelings of regret, failure, dreams deferred, unhealed trauma.
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