I’ve never been a great original artist. I consider myself more of an arranger. I like to take what people have already done or an idea that someone already has and take the steps to try and make it better. To polish it and put it out to the world.
I’ve often realized thought that the times I feel the most inspiration to create is when there is a feeling of nostalgia. Maybe the emotions that are most written about are love (or the reverse: heartbreak) but I think what rings the truest for me are the songs that simply talk about stories of life. The feelings that come with it. A sort of melancholy feeling. Though melancholy might be too dark a way to describe it. It’s some mix between melancholy and whimsical.
Once again as I think about this though, perhaps that’s why love and heartbreak are such hard hitters. They are a type of nostalgia.
The definition of nostalgia: “a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one’s life, to one’s home or homeland, or to one’s family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time”
Both heartbreak and love in some ways seem like they are parts of nostalgia. Heartbreak being that desire to return to something that you no longer have. A feeling or emotion, or maybe a physical location or touch. Love, on the other hand, is almost a feeling of nostalgia for the future. I wish there was a better word to describe it. The cloud nine feeling. Excitement for the future but also a desire to be right where you are. To have all of the adventures now but to take your time at the same moment.
It seems a broader way to say nostalgia might just be “dreaming”. Dreaming about the past and the future. Sometimes, maybe even dreaming about right where you’re at.
It puts you in a different headspace. Sometimes it’s music that can send you there. Sometimes it’s a smell that skyrockets you back to a moment from your childhood or the combination of a sight and sound that you don’t know quite how to place. Almost a feeling of deja vu.
Perhaps the reason nostalgia helps us get into the space for creating is because we try so hard most of our life to be where we are. Present. Something that’s important…but it’s hard to look big picture where you’re at. When you look at the past, you can look at the big picture of how big and small things impacted the future of where you’re at. The future is the reverse. There’s so much potential for where you could go that it seems so big and wide open.
You can get a big picture of the past and the future, but it’s harder to do that right where you’re at. By looking to these other times, you’re able to create almost like a third person looking in. As if you could be the one participating or the person in it. Maybe you’re both.
The imagination can go crazy from this point. Anything seems on the table. It’s not you anymore. You’re an observer looking at, writing another story. Another song, a piece of art.
Throughout all of this though, it’s important to know that this doesn’t mean that what you create is good. It doesn’t even mean that what you create when you’re in this headspace will have any advantage over what you create when you have to.
I think, though, it allows you to create with a passion and desire that’s not always there when the pressure is on. To the rest of the world, it may be garbage. It may not be useful to the rest of the world. But when you’re there in the moment creating, you don’t care about that. You don’t care about people-pleasing. You don’t care if the rest of the world looks or doesn’t look, you simply want to create. You want to put something together that you can remember.
What if we went one layer deeper in all of this? This isn’t our home. God has put us here for this time but as his creation, we desire to be with Him. We desire to be home with him. We will never find that here on this earth, but maybe, just for a moment when we are creating, we are trying to create something that give us nostalgia for something that we don’t have yet. The home that we will have forever with Him.
We are created in the image of God, and one of the defining factors of God is that he’s a creator. We have a desire to be like Him. To go after Him.
The next time you feel a wave of nostalgia, I challenge you to create somthing. Whether a silly bracelet, a song, take some crayons out and color even.
Use the moment of nostalgia and embrace the moment and look forward to the day that we will be
HOME.