Scents bring the strangest things to mind at the strangest of times. The smell of bubble bath soap in the air during a walk through the neighborhood, the way smoke lingers on clothing after a night by the fire, the tickle of champagne in your nose on New Year’s Eve.
Each carries a fragment of life that, before that very minute, might have been lost in time forever.
In one whiff of smoke, I can remember the way the moonlight rippled on the water, the muted hum of adults talking around the jumping flames, the sticky marshmallow on my fingers. How venturing further down the beach felt like exiting one world and entering another, the way everything turned blue in the night except for the fire.
So much of life is spent remembering, longing, and reconstructing, if we’re not careful. I don’t think reminiscing is a bad thing, but if we bathe in the waters of nostalgia too often, it can keep us looking back instead of forward.
If you’re a long-time reader of my posts, you know I struggle with this—the constant over-the-shoulder gasp at what I’ve left behind, the chest-gripping realization that some things are lost forever, and nothing we can do or think or believe can bring them back.
I know the risks of indulging in what once was, but I still inhale the smoke deeper, I still pause in the street to capture the bubble bath soap memory in my mind like a lightning bug in a jar. I still curl my hand around the champagne flute and smile at memories of birthdays past. I still lean into the bittersweetness of remembering.
But I don’t think I do it because I want to go back. I think it comes from a real sense of wanting to reaffirm the parts of life that really build who we are, the tangible senses that fill in the mental map of our lives. The truth of what it feels like to be alive.
As someone who spends the majority of her days typing, calculating, analyzing, creating, and living in the digital world, it’s astounding that the strongest memories are not of a screen and little black marks—they are of rainy walks to the train after work with the scent of wet pavement strong in the air, standing on my deck in the morning sun, birdsong ringing out around me, crows cawing from the willow trees.
The smell of paper, supple and warm in my fingers, the click of a pen. The grounded comfort of pressing ink to page and watching it sprawl to life. The scratch of pencil on a sketchbook. The smell of acrylic paint and the glide of brush on canvas.
It’s not that I think digital experiences are less important or lesser-than or what have you, but more and more I feel the immediacy and wonder of a world that I can touch and that can touch me back, and not just metaphorically.
The fact that when I remember watching movies as a young child, with no responsibilities or cares, it’s not only the movie that brings the nostalgia—it’s the smells of dinner cooking in the next room, the sound of my mother singing under her breath, the feeling of a soft blanket around my shoulders. My brothers laugh.
It’s not that media and the digital world are not real—it’s that they need the tangible world to retain value. Without the dinners and the laughter and the snuggles on the couch, the in-person debates, the connections, the discoveries, the chaotic experiments, they are just marks and shapes on different screens.
Without a world we can physically touch, we’re left with nothing—a polished, un-messy stream of nothingness.
I’m not against innovation. Not at all. But I think of these things when people start valuing speed and repeatability over creation and genuine experiences. Something that has become “easy” due to a tool is only able to do so because people came before it and carved the way with blood, sweat, and tears the hard way. Nothing comes from nowhere.
You can’t have what’s next without what has come before, and that is a constant part of life.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for this month. I’m just trying not to lose the beauty of reality in the uphill battle of tech innovation vs the creative process.
As Bob Dylan says, the times they are a-changin’.
But the one thing that has never changed is how important authenticity is for finding real meaning and fulfillment in our lives.
Thank you for reading.