Sam and I were trying to find a photograph from 2014 or 2015 for his second-year community planning class, which is the sort of task that sounds simple and efficient until you find yourself, 40 minutes later, emotionally sideswiped by an image of your child at nine tucked up in bed with six stuffies, grinning into the camera as if life were, on balance, an excellent idea.
We fell down the rabbit hole, as one does.
There were the forts in the middle of your living room and a new puppy so small you could hold him in one hand and the ordinary kitchen moments no one would have thought to label important at the time. There were vacations, yes, but also muddy soccer fields, birthday cakes, backpacks, and for some reason, dozens of photos I took of the boys sleeping. The kind of daily life that never seems remarkable while you are in it, and then later becomes almost unbearably dear.
And, as always happens with old photos, I found myself thinking: everyone looks so happy.
Not performatively happy. Not curated happy. Not "we paid for this experience and now we must smile accordingly" happy. Just genuinely, sweetly, almost suspiciously happy.
· · ·
Which made me wonder whether I look back at the past through rose-coloured glasses.
But not in the usual way people mean it.
Not because the past was necessarily better. Not because those years were easy or simple or free of the low-grade panic that accompanies raising children, managing a household, meeting deadlines, and trying to keep all the plates spinning without one of them crashing to the floor in front of witnesses.
I suspect something else may be going on.
I wonder if I look back at those years through rose-coloured glasses because I am, at this point in my life… genuinely… happier. More grateful. More content than I ever remember being, even for a single day, during those years themselves.
· · ·
At the time, I was inside the machinery of life. I was not standing in a shaft of golden perspective, murmuring to myself, "What a beautiful season. I must really take this in." I was packing lunches and buying groceries and driving people places and worrying about things both large and absurdly small.
I was probably tired. I was definitely busy. I was, like most women in the thick of family life, doing twelve things at once and calling it normal.
Even the lovely moments often passed through me quickly because there was always something next.
So perhaps when I look back now, I am not falsely romanticizing the past. Perhaps I am finally able to see it.
Perhaps the softness is not in the years themselves, but in the woman doing the looking.
That feels truer to me than nostalgia.
· · ·
Maybe the reason the past looks so warm is not that it was more magical, but that I am more peaceful now. Maybe I have become someone more capable of recognizing happiness, even retroactively. More able to appreciate what was good. More able to see the beauty inside the ordinary without immediately interrupting it with a to-do list.
Which is both comforting and a little annoying.
Comforting because it suggests something has shifted in me for the better. Annoying because it means I may not have been nearly as present for those years as I would now like to imagine.
Still, I think this is one of the strange gifts of getting older. You do not just accumulate experience. You become a different witness to your own life.
You see more. You understand more. You judge less harshly.
You realize that a kitchen full of lunch containers and growing children and backpacks on the floor was not, in fact, a period to be gotten through. It was real life. It was the whole shimmering thing.
· · ·
And maybe that is what the photographs are always trying to tell us.
Not that the past was perfect. Not that we should all live backwards. Just that there was more goodness there than we knew.
· · ·
I also suspect this means something useful for the present.
Because if I am now looking back at those years with more tenderness than I felt while living them, then surely the same will one day be true of this moment. This version of life. This face. This age. This ordinary Friday with its emails and errands and mild emotional weather.
One day I may look back at photos from now and think: there it was. There was the beauty. There was the life I was too busy inhabiting to fully admire.
Which makes me think the job is not to stop seeing the past through rose-coloured glasses.
The job is to realize that perhaps the glasses belong to me now.
And to try, every so often, to look at the present through them too.
~ Danielle
The Midlife Syllabus
Lesson #18
Sometimes the glow is not in the memory. It is in the person remembering.
Beauty, Grace & Daily Artistry
A small, imperfect pleasure:
There is something deeply moving about old digital photographs from the early 2010s.
The lighting is patchy. The angles are chaotic. Someone is always half-blinking. The outfits are often a cry for help.
And yet they carry so much atmosphere that they border on art.
Also, I would like it noted for the record that an alarming number of us were out there wearing statement necklaces with great confidence.
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The quiet way time turns ordinary life into something almost holy.
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This Week on the Blog
A piece on reconnecting with people who knew you back when. Send the text. Reclaim the connection. You're not who you used to be. Neither are they.