Don't Look Past the (Micro) Past

Visual by Layan Dajani

“The past beats inside me like a second heart” – John Banville, ‘The Sea’

Sometimes, I can almost feel them.

Sometimes, when it’s quiet, I can almost taste their presence. 

Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can almost feel a slight hum that lies subtly below the noise of the present. The hum of the people who used to occupy the space which I stand in; their conversations resonate around the room faintly – an echo of a shadow.  

***

Here’s the thing. Even as a teenager who hasn’t lived for relatively that long, I have always been a very sentimental person. Whether it is tokens from my primary school days or photographs of days gone by, I cling onto whatever I can to the past. I write unnecessarily verbose entries in my diary to try and lock down every detail in words for my future self. 

I live for trips down memory lane. You should’ve seen the extremely emotional and, dare I say, melodramatic graduation piece I wrote for my grade’s Year 12 Yearbook. You also should’ve seen my anguished face when Rob Palmer and Jason Hodges were replaced on Better Homes and Gardens, a show which I have watched since I was a little child and a show which I continue to watch every Friday night. Oh, and you should’ve seen this one time when I showed up at the doorstep of the house I used to live in a decade ago and meekly asked the new owners if I could have a look around the backyard to evoke childhood memories. (In hindsight, this would’ve been a very strange request to receive indeed and I am so grateful that the owners were so gracious and actually let me do so.) I’m not afraid to admit it - nostalgia is my middle name.

And here’s the thing. I have come to the realization that this sentimentality often extends beyond myself, beyond my own personal experiences. Combining with my somewhat nosy sense of curiosity, it has burgeoned into something new entirely. There is a new, obscure word out there called ‘anemoia’, which refers to nostalgia for a time one has never known. I’d like to think my feelings are something like that, although the term doesn’t describe it exactly. 

Okay, so this probably sounds like typical teenage angst but hear me out. From time to time, I feel out of place - like I’m viewing the world through my own idiosyncratic lens.

In my perception, a bench presents not just a matter of a place to sit, but a matter of who has sat there before.

The photographs that adorn a school hallway are not just images framed for framing’s sake but a capture of a single moment in time. The smiling faces within them not just printed pixels or exposed imprints on photographic film, but real people with dreams of their own.

The jacaranda tree, which I often walk past coming home from school, was a sapling once and the foundations of the walls which I live in were laid by someone at some point in time. 

I watch my peers walk past the photographs at high school without a second thought. I watch their faces glance over the trophies in the cabinet without looking at the names on them. I watch them sit at a table, ignorant of the marks and engravings scratched by former students – the remnants that the people before us had left behind.

Contrastingly, I couldn’t help but want to know more about the people before us. I cannot tell you how many lunchtimes I spent perusing through my school’s archives. I had to get special permission to do so but it was like my version of heaven. While I was still a student, this strong desire to understand my school’s history also led me to reach out to and interview more than 20 past school captains for an article series I wrote for our school’s bulletin. I was so emotionally overwhelmed and blown away by all the responses I received from all these people. There was just something so ineffably beautiful about hearing all their stories and experiences about their life during and after school and I was so grateful that I was given the chance to compile all of these memories into a publication that would preserve them.

I feel a sense of exhilaration whenever I find a trinket of the past: old photographs of familiar places, a list of names of the previous owners of a textbook, a speck of colour behind an area of peeled paint revealing what laid there before, and so on. They call out, murmuring hints of the past’s existence. 

When I say the word ‘past’, what images come to mind? Cleopatra? World War I? Elegant dresses that upper class women wore during the 1800s? All these historical things I’ve mentioned are part of what I like to call the macro past. That is, the past on a large, global scale. Revolutions, wars, the suffragette movement. That’s all part of the macro past. But the micro past - the past on a personal level - is also something that intrigues me greatly. 

Because when you stand in the Tiered Learning Centre (TLC) at my old high school you don’t just don’t stand in the TLC. You stand in the TLC which once was a hall that didn’t have tiered seating and the place where students did their HSC exams before the examination centre was built, according to former Senator and 2001 alumnus Sam Dastyari. When you walk in the school’s quad, you walk in the quad that once was severely flooded in 2007, the quad where assemblies once were held before the gymnasium was built almost 2 decades ago. There’s more than meets the eye. There are stories that whisper beneath the surface of the present, stories waiting to be rediscovered. 

So once a while, take a moment to look around and just peel back the layers of the present. You can even see this happening literally with the layers of paint on buildings. Take for example the paint on some of the areas of my high school. What is now black, was once this lilac, purplish colour, which once was a creamy yellow. 

We live in a world where change is abundant. Granted, change is always an inevitable, ubiquitous factor of life but nevertheless, we live in turbulently changing times. Take for example the new Australian dollar notes. The digitalization of the NAPLAN test. Brexit. The new syllabus of the Higher School Certificate. Marriage equality, which was way overdue but finally arrived in 2017 in Australia. Climate change. Social reforms. Construction and renovation. Technology and innovation. Change is present in many different forms and magnitudes, in all levels of society. Change is scary, change is exciting. Change carves the path towards our tomorrow.

But as I walk past the entrance of a previous house that I grew up in, past the tree stump that used to be the location of the tree house my sister and I had built, I can’t help but remember the life I had all those years ago. 

I see people uninterested in knowing even a little about our school’s past. I see children roll their eyes in boredom when their grandparents try to recount experiences from their time. I see students bored in history classes, deeming it as “irrelevant” and I see people sneer at older technology, labelling it as archaic. I see people taking everything for granted without trying to understand how and when it got there. 

Every person, object and place has its own story to tell, a story that should be cherished, a story that should be recognized. While we look towards what will be, we shouldn’t forget what was. 

Because it matters. Don’t look past the past.