Thinking (and Feeling) Through Time
Nostalgia, ghosts, and our collective imagination
Welcome to Newsletter twenty-five of Once More, With Feeling.
It is summer and for me, summer has always been full of ghosts. I’m from a large tight-knit family in New England and rather than go on a variety of adventures in the summers, we tend to return to the same haunts year after year. There is something about repeatedly returning to a place only at a certain time of year as children are born and grow, as loved ones wither and are lost, that results in a thick layering of people and memories over a landscape.
“True joy is a profound remembering; and true grief the same.”—Clive Barker
I bring my offspring to Oak Bluffs with my cousin, where she and I would romp as children ourselves. On a recent run through Oak Bluffs I felt like I could reach out and graze with my hand both my past selves and beloved ones who have already shuffled off their mortal coils. Over there in the dunes 17-year-old me lies with two of my younger cousins, reading them inappropriately explicit novels because reading aloud to them meant they would stop pestering me to put my book down. In that house around the corner, the one with the screen door that slams so loudly everyone jumps, my aunt Burma peers over my 35-year-old shoulder and asks if I’m going to put any butter in that pan of bread I’m frying (there was already a good stick’s worth). That beach over there still holds the faint echoes of raucous games of Steal the Rocks, and I try to stop my brain from counting how many of the players have subsequently left this earth, their voices stilled.
Different ghosts layer Westport, MA with my brothers and maternal extended family, and Harwichport, Cape Cod with my in-laws.
All of it has me thinking about how we think and feel and love backward and forward through time, and what it all says about our social natures.
BE THE SPARK - Thoughts on Teaching and Learning
Before the advent of educational development, a combination of past educational experiences and current experimentation were the main sources of teaching inspiration, our past educational experiences haunting our present as we step from the role of student to the role of instructor. But we live in an age of information abundance, with teaching and learning no exception—and one pedagogical resource that stands shoulders above the rest is Bonni Stachowiak’s luminous podcast Teaching in Higher Ed. Somehow, Bonni has successfully delivered into our earbuds an episode of teaching inspiration every single week for ten years. Every single week for ten years. She generously agreed to hop on Zoom with me and share some thinking about that impressive milestone, thinking back through time to the podcast’s beginnings and forward in time to its future.
When I ask Bonni if she experiences nostalgia in thinking back over 10 years of TiHE, she immediately tells me of sharing with her now 10- and 12-year-olds the milestone (“you do the math to how old they were when it all started!”) and them asking to listen to the very first episode together. They were all delighted to discover that the first episode featured teaching lessons Bonni had learned from parenting infants and toddlers.
She also shared a much more recent story that I think adeptly captures our collective experience of both the past and the future. The podcast is so well established and regarded at this point that Bonni receives more emails with ideas and proposals for episodes than she can possibly respond to. One recently came in that caught her eye and her imagination—it was from researcher, poet, and Visiting Assistant Professor Adelmar Ramírez (keep your eyes out for his episode in the future).
The interview was great, she shared, but she was struck when at the end of the recording he told her that he had been a faithful listener for nine and a half years—he had been in lock-step with her the entire time, the whole journey. Her voice in his earbuds, her thoughts and the thoughts of her guests influencing his career and life for nearly a decade. “The intimacy of this particular medium is really remarkable,” Bonni says, and cites some research on the topic. People develop parasocial relationships with podcast hosts, having whole conversations with them in their heads, feeling like must know their dogs or the landscape of the walks around the lake where they listen. She feels this power and the weight of responsibility on her shoulders, and takes it seriously.
Bonni is also excited to think forward into the future, and wants to bring more people like Adelmar to the table—to talk with each other rather than to her. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the podcast Bonni is planning to have an online scavenger hunt of sorts (Goosechase!), with prizes and story sharing and practical action to create a better teaching world. She wants to create a space where we can “be in solidarity with these people from all over the world, the ways in which our stories fit together.” You can follow along and get more details here.
Two non-time-based teaching and learning notes: 1) in case you missed it, I wrote a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about what I perceive as a growing backlash against the demands of student-centered teaching, and what how I think educational development should adapt - check it out and let me know what you think! and 2) also in the Chronicle (and possibly tangentially related), Beckie Supiano shares a beautiful profile of a student-focused professor who walked away from his tenure-track line to protect his well-being. I love how focusing on one illustrative narrative can be more damning than a stack of data and analysis. Higher ed, take note.
FEELING AND STRIVING - Emotion & Motivation
My last newsletter was all about the concept of friction, and I was delighted to see many other thinkers writing and posting about friction at the same time, a nice demonstration of our collective hivemind. Something similar has happened this month with nostalgia. I’ve been puttering around in this post for a good month, and in the meantime John Warner wrote on his SubStack about the dangers of nostalgia when it impacts our political imaginations, and Anya Kamenetz wrote her own about why we should be more nostalgic. Her post mirrors mine, beginning with the twinning of nostalgia for one’s own childhood and that of one’s growing children. “I anticipate this feeling will keep doubling up and shifting, like pleating the fabric of a napkin between my fingers. The wrinkles in time,” she writes. She goes on to argue that nostalgia can be powerful, that it can remind us of what we love enough to summon the energy and willingness to fight for it.
There is a large body of literature suggesting that nostalgia can have benefits for well-being, as it is an act of “peopling one’s mind” and thus may shore up feelings of social connection even when one is currently alone.
But like John and Anya’s dueling posts, nostalgia can be an emotional double-edged sword, with both positive and negative impacts. This is not a surprise to me or my previous student and current colleague and friend Ryan Glode, as for his senior honors thesis we investigated the impact of a nostalgia on emotions and discovered that for those people with secure relationship attachments, perhaps trusting in their social relationships and the likelihood of fond times in the future, nostalgic reveries benefited their recovery from a sad mood induction. But for those with insecure relationships, waxing nostalgic resulted in a blunted sadness recovery—one can imagine that for these folks, they worried that such warm, socially connected times might forever be lost.
HIVEMIND - Our Synchronous Selves
So for those trusting in their futures, simmering in past socially connected times may give one an emotional boost in the present. What about thinking collectively into the future, what many of Bonni’s podcast guests and listeners do regularly, imagining shared futures? In an exciting new article on a relatively new concept called “collaborative imagination” a group of psychologists investigated just this phenomenon.
They ask “Can imagining a shared future be the first step toward creating one?” which reminds me greatly of Michael Chabon writing in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, “Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation.”
Experimentally, the researchers summoned participants to their lab and assigned dyads (two participants who had never met before) to one of three conditions: collaboratively imagining a future together (e.g., a 4th of July picnic), individually imagining such a future (to control for the pure effects of an imaginative exercise), and collaborative gaming together (to control for the effects of working together on a shared imaginative task that didn’t project into the future). Participants then rated their feelings of social connection to their partner, and then engaged in a recall task.
“Imagination itself can be a socially constructed process
that affects how close and connected we feel to others.”
The results indicated that as expected, thinking together into the future increased feelings of social connection (liking and valuing their partner, and feeling greater satisfaction with the relationship) compared to the control conditions, and it also increased the consideration of their partner’s thoughts and feelings, and heightened the vividness of the imagined event.
INCIDENTALLY - Peach Heroes
Nostalgia and imagination might thread us together and shore up our social connections by mentally projecting us into the past (to a time when we were less lonely) and into the future (imagining hopeful collective possibilities), but what about strengthening our connections in the present? Turns out, a much-maligned tool might help us out here—social media.
I know I’m perceived as a bit of a social media apologist in an era when everyone loves to demonize it. I’m not immune to the many ways that social media tools are at least a little bit evil, and may have, y’know, destroyed democracy.
But they certainly can also tie us closer together when used in a way that enhances rather than eclipses our social relationships.
A case in point: Peach Heroes.
I belong to a wonderful community supported agriculture program out of Red Fire Farm in Montague, MA. This past April Massachusetts had a late frost that threatened peach crops everywhere—and indeed, only a few years ago a late frost wiped most of the peach harvest from the region.
As this year’s frost approached, the farmers put out a call to their CSA members, a plea for help to save the peach trees. A plea, in other words, for some peach heroes.
A host of volunteers showed up to tend fires to keep the trees warm, and to aim whirling fans to carry the warmed air to their branches. A host of others cheered from the social media sidelines, including a favorite local book store and cafe, Bedlam Book and Cafe, who chimed in encouragement and a hope for local peaches in their amazing smoothies. I wish I could tell you I was one of the peach heroes but I saw it all go down after the fact. But watching the Reel above and reading through the comments made me feel interconnected in a local web of relationships, farmers and consumers of produce and booksellers and readers all supporting each other with their labor, time, and financial resources.
Summer is a time of ghosts but it is also one of peaches. If you love peaches and easy recipes in the summer, I’ve never had anyone reject a piece of this peachy icebox pound cake from Martha Stewart.
In a classic "find typos by hitting submit," just realized the typo in Bonni's last name. (Fixed in the online edition but cannot do anything about the email copies). Apologies Bonni!
I've had several moments this past year where I've felt that nostalgic layering you talk about in the first part of the post. Have you seen the new season of "The Bear"? The last episode touches on a similar vibe.