I’m told that there is this thing called nostalgia; it is an emotion of longing for the past, of remembering happier times before today, when all seemed right with the world, when the future was bright and endless. It is the feeling that people sometimes get as they remember their time in high school, or college, or an endless summer as a child, playing in green fields, collecting pollywogs from a pond or creek, building a tree house, drinking lemonade on a muggy afternoon late in July.

I know that such a thing as nostalgia exists, but I’m unsure that I’ve experienced it personally. Perhaps, as I get older, a tipping point will come when I start looking back and remembering and thinking about it more than the present and tomorrow. But for now, I find myself mostly living today, wondering about tomorrow and planning for next week. I spend practically no time mulling over yesterday. And I never look back over my shoulder and sigh wistfully, misty-eyed, through gauzy, rose tinting.

Perhaps my failure at nostalgia comes from the way I look at life, which tends toward the coldly realistic. In recalling the past, I recall not just the happy moments; I recall them fully. If I take the time, as I am just now, to consider a moment in my past, it appears to me as little different in texture than the present moment.

In college I spent two wonderful summers in Israel. I worked on a kibbutz and got to travel about the country. But I recall not just seeing the foreign land, gazing in awe at the Sea of Galilee, standing in the ruins of the ancient synagogue in Capernaum where Jesus taught or peering into the empty tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. I don’t just remember walking on top of the city walls near Mt. Zion late at night.

Instead, I feel the exhaustion of never having enough sleep. I re-experience the embarrassment of getting lost in a banana field one morning so that I couldn’t find my way back to the tractor in time for my break. I recall the blistering heat, and the sunburns. I relive the long rides in hot stuffy buses without air conditioning. I hear the high-pitched whine of mosquitos and once again experience the horror of coming upon a banana spider as big as my head, hanging between two trees. I shiver anew in the cold showers in rusty, broken down communal huts and reuse restrooms in a public park that consisted of a lime encrusted hole in the ground instead of a toilet. I remember eating the same meal, two times a day, seven days a week for a whole summer: lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, hard boiled eggs, bread and plain yogurt. I recall being pelted with stones by angry Palestinians in Ramallah while being hustled back into our bus by our Uzi-toting Israeli friends.

The same thing happens as I recall a summer on my grandparents’ farm. I remember the green fields filled with sweet smelling mint plants, the dampness of the tall grasses, the chitterings of the seven-year locusts and the cold babbling creek filled with crawdads and pollywogs. I remember picking up fossils embedded in crumbling limestone near the bridge that ran over the creek.

But I also recall worrying because my father was in Vietnam for the second time and how he wouldn’t be coming home for another seven months. I remember being bored as the night wore on and I sat in my grandparents’ living room and my mom and great aunt and my grandparents talked endlessly into the night.

With every bit of my past—which I must make an effort to dredge up since I spend no time ever thinking about it unless someone asks me—I see it in all its fullness. Life is never really rose-colored. It has, instead, the same feel, the same texture, the same reality as the present. I sit here before my computer while my youngest daughter works on her independent study school work. Occasionally I answer her questions. I can, if I put my mind to it, think back to her as an infant, and with that comes not just the cherubically snoozing pale baby, but also the diaper changes in the middle of the night, the feedings at three in the morning, and of never being able to get enough sleep. I remember the nearly weekly visits from social workers, since when she was an infant, she was still just our foster child—we had yet to adopt her. And I can remember all the good times and all the bad times and how each day and each week had its share of joys and heartaches.

Jesus told his disciples one day, “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matthew 6:34). The author of Ecclesiastes wrote, “Do not say, ‘Why were the old days better than these?’ For it is not wise to ask such questions.”(Ecclesiastes 7:10). Nostalgia for the past is little different than worry about the future. And just about as accurate or fruitful.

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