For the longest time, I viewed my experience living in Toronto with a mix of contempt and cynicism. Truthfully, I was being a bit unfair. Most of the 2 years I spent in the city was devoid of colour, creativity, and change. Naturally, I couldn't shake the bitter taste in my mouth as my mind craved an alternative life — one filled with continent-hopping and community-building. But even if I try my hardest, I can't discount the meaningful moments and memories that I've created with a star-studded cast of funky friends. Nostalgia!
After a lifetime away from the cultural capital of Canada (?), it's only fitting that my first stop takes place somewhere that would turbocharge my journey through memory lane. Here's my attempt at embodying the iconic literary styles of Joan Didion and Annie Dillard: an inquisitive & investigative view of my (second) favourite place in Toronto:
Living Evergreen07.27.22There's a peaceful warmth in the air. Grey skies, but still oddly dreamy. The trees stand firm, mute, and rigid like well-preserved Egyptian obelisks, glowing with generosity despite being on summer vacation. The bikers zoom rapidly, the walkers roam slowly, and the puppers sniff fiercely; a grassy gathering ground for urban creatures to recharge together. The creek ripples and oscillates, absorbing the medley of scents and sounds that emerge and converge from all directions. Wildflowers meet the waterworks, charm sprouts from the chaos. Everything is crisp; the expansive brickworks.My memories flood back. That's right, this is a soothing space! The simple act of strolling past the garden market discharges nostalgia through my veins, bombarding my heartstrings and elevating my mood to a fever pitch. This was my prime detox spot: one that I would liberally use to unplug and unwind. It's hard to the beat the curated farmer's markets and decorated winter's village. Of course, I'm a city boy at heart, but my perfect setup is having an accessible nature option at my fingertips. NYC: TBD.Wait, stop for a second. Look over there. A rare sighting across the marsh. A black-crowned night heron dips its beak into the water with fervour. It pulls back quickly and gracefully. A small blood orange koi fish flails in the heron's mouth, its fate forcefully sealed. A snapping turtle lazily floats by with pure indifference. A bushy bunny basks beside the shrubbery, alert as always. My friend later adds, "it's so cool how all these different species live here!"This is Evergreen — a taste of Toronto's natural splendour.
There's a certain lightness to the word “nostalgia” that I really like. It's a subtle kick, a savoury sensation. A desire to return to something sentimental, a yearning for an idealized past. When we feel nostalgic, we can choose to pause at that particular moment and stretch it out a little longer. We soak in the good feeling of reminiscing, of suspending ourselves in animated history. “Novelty” exists on the other end as a concept that lives rent-free in my head. Novel experiences are punctuated by sharp senses of awe and wonder; novelty is often associated with extremity, a quality that expands our horizons and evokes discomfort.
Wacky wordplay aside, one thought experiment I've been noodling lately on is whether nostalgia and novelty can co-exist. It's definitely not as simple as a binary tree of old vs. new, or past vs. future. I think there's an interesting outcome when you treat these two forces as complements rather than substitutes. The result is that you get an alchemic mixture that balances familiarity and freshness. This sounds obvious, but you can always accessorize even the most mundane situation or setting, like finding a new curious object on the same everyday walk home. If you'll entertain my stream of hot takes, I think you can feel nostalgic in the context of new experiences too. Jessica Helfand via inspiration from Emerson: “Fall in love with some new thing, or even revisit what’s right in front of you in a new way, and fall in love with that”.
The most common question I got asked this week: “what's making you want to come back to Canada?”Just to visit people, I replied. I originally thought my trip would be a kind of posthumous victory lap as a keen ex-Torontonian, with 90% nostalgia and only 10% novelty reserved for “custom adventure time”. Aside from planning hangouts with the close homies, I didn't build a strict itinerary of places to see or things to do. I thought I wouldn't even have time or motivation to schedule serendipity and random solo side quests like I usually do.
So what happens when a conspicuous cutie suggests that we meet next to an inconspicuous island branded with giant green animal figurines at 7 am? I can't count how many times I've jogged past the exact same spot on the Harbourfront boardwalk, but it's the unique combination of abnormal timing, artistic expression, and engaging conversation that breathes life into an otherwise dreary Thursday morning. That's peak nostalgic novelty if I've ever seen it.
In my inner world where improvisation reigns supreme, you live fully by doubling down on spontaneity and saying Yes (&). You embrace mathematical law of exponential compounding to unlock newfound areas of excitement. Yes to getting boiled like a lobster in a sweltering sauna and plunging into frigid ice baths within the span of 20 minutes, and Yes to waking up for 6 am sunrise yoga sessions after dancing the night away at a hip dive bar filled with throwback 2010's bangers. All in the same city that I was so sure had nothing else to offer. To top it all off, the same friend that I explored Evergreen with recently asked me if I wanted to join her for a 10-day silent meditation retreat in December. You should already know what my answer was. Some people would read all of this and ask: what kind of drugs are you on hipsterwam? To that I respond: we can joke our desires into existence, as a cheeky form of manifestation.
One tangential point I'm trying to make is that it's very helpful to check yourself when you draw from the inventory of past mindsets: your biases and behaviours can bundle up as mental baggage if you're not careful. It's soothing to think about how far we've come, and so we indulge in the past. But stay past your welcome, and you start to decay. Our attempts to replicate the past are inevitably corroded: we never get the same thing twice. Even so, we want to relive certain feelings and keep certain people. We make bargains, praying to return. Hoping it’ll feel the same way again, but we never do.
The important part is accepting that this generation loss is completely okay. The best conversations I had this past week were built on layers of “old selves” that helped us shed past identities and grow up. There's comfort in knowing that we have a built-in sonar system to pinpoint nostalgia, where we can broadcast it like a bat signal and vibe with co-creators and co-conspirators who matter most to us. These nostalgic echoes are etched in our inner caves of memory, guarded by fleeting ghosts that carry an array of stories and histories. Accepting these ancient relics is both an act of preservation and a vote for self-progress. A reminder that good things happen when you stay open and ready to receive. Letting yourself daydream is equally as compelling as curating nostalgia. Then, my ultimate goal with past/future immersion — of feeding nostalgia and novelty — is to inform and enable better ways of being present. . . .
I was originally going to call this piece “nested nostalgia”. When you nest a code block in software engineering, you are indirectly calling back to the function that exists as the codebase's “old faithful” (a different kind of nostalgic loop). Nest also implies home — literally for birds coming back to roost and proverbially for youth crossing the chasm to adulthood. What I can say after sunsetting July with a lens of nostalgia: it felt good to be home.
Pulling from an adored author, Murakami ponders: “Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?” In some sense, isn't that what living evergreen really means? To craft life and love that is both generative and regenerative, a life that remains perennially fresh and interesting. Always as new as it were in the beginning.
Here's to opening up more channels of nostalgic novelty :)
To reply you need to sign in.