Wistful thinking

Nostalgia for the past, 'Farsickness' for the future

“Should I do the pancakes tomorrow, or just wait until the weekend?”

I asked my husband this the night before our son’s seventh birthday, which fell on a Friday. I asked, even though we both knew the answer. If you insist on creating a tradition, your family will insist on you keeping it. So, that Friday morning, I ladled pancake batter onto a popping skillet to form the letters of his name: C H A R L I E.

The other family members—Cole, Cora, Ruby—each have four letters in their names which, when pancaked, fit easily onto a plate. The seven letters of Charlie’s name and mine overflow the bounds of a plate. This year, seven is also the number of candles, the number of years of our Charlie. It’s the number of completion, they say, though we feel very much in the middle of our middle child’s life, watching and waiting to see how it unfolds.

Somewhere between the singing and the liturgy and the dancing in the kitchen to his favorite song, I feel the wistfulness settling in. On their birthdays, it’s as though I am re-reading the novel of their lives, the past and future coming into focus at the same time. This is how you used to be, and this is how you are becoming. You are in-between. And we will hold the pieces until they come together.

It’s the holding-the-pieces part that keeps me writing things down.

“Is this why we write?”

Maggie Smith

asks in the memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, “To bronze the baby shoes? To save all of it?”¹

I read this a couple days after I’d jotted another scrap of memory into my phone notes and, eventually, my journal. Lately, I’ve been dictating them into my phone too, details about right now that I’m desperate to remember.

He’s seven
and he dances
to Time After Time
like he’ll never run out of it.

This time, 
he makes sure his sisters 
have plenty of pancakes too. 

This time, 
his dance moves show 
he is his own
no self-consciousness
(still working on self-control). 

He is at home. 

I have been writing more poetry than usual after attending the HopeWords Conference earlier this month in Bluefield, West Virginia. Scratch that. I have been dictating poetry into my phone while driving and then, a few days later, coming back to it at my computer to see if it’s worth salvaging. Inspiration never comes at a truly convenient time, I’ve decided, and that’s as true of poetry as it is of beautiful conferences that make you want to quit everything that’s not writing. I adored this conference. As I wrote on Instagram about it:

This isn’t a “room of one’s own,” but perhaps something better, a koinonia, a place of knowing and making known the things none of us can fully express.

But hey—let’s spend our lives trying.

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I’ve also been marinating in a few words I’ve come across at and since the conference. Smith, in the aforementioned book, wrote about the roots of the word nostalgia in a way that struck me. “The nost- in nostalgia means homecoming. The -algia means pain.” Yes. We can always revisit the sweetest bits of our memories, but greeting us there is the pain that we cannot, in fact, go back.

And then there is farsickness, an English approximation of the German word fernweh—a longing for a place we’ve not yet been. Daniel Nayeri spoke about this in his talk at HopeWords too. As I wrote on Instagram this week:

“It’s what stirs inside when we see beauty, and when we sense that we could or should experience it more deeply. We seem to know deep down that every scene, every word, every song is an arrow pointing beyond itself to something greater, just out of reach.”

But hey—let’s keep reaching.

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I have done it again: I am reading entirely too many books at once. But perhaps if I tell you about some of them, I will see the ways they are speaking to each other and to me (and justify the growing stack!).

Am Reading 📚

• The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. I was 28 hours into this 31-hour audiobook when my library lease lapsed. I cancelled my Audible membership years ago after discovering Hoopla via local libraries, but I re-upped my subscription for one month to finish this epic generational novel that made me feel the heat and tension of growing up in a web of family in India.

• The other reason I upped the Audible subscription? To get my hands on Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation immediately. The book was actually mentioned to me first by a source in a heated discussion about data centers (which I’ve written about extensively). It is a data-driven (and maybe able to convince my husband?) analysis of the high-cost, low-benefit risks of introducing social media and video games to our children at young ages. It feels like a secular version of Andy Crouch’s The Tech-Wise Family, and it gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, our broader culture can count the costs and shift gears.

• If that is the put off, then the put on is good stories with and for my kids. We’ve started reading The Green Ember series with the kids, though my oldest and I have already read it, after I got the chance to meet S.D. Smith at HopeWords. He sent a video message to one of my friend’s sons who is his “biggest fan”—and isn’t it great when children’s book authors are all you hoped they’d be?

• Three books that come out soon that I’m diving into:

  • I’ve just begun reading my friend Sarah Rice’s new book Gospel-Shaped Womanhood, which comes out in the U.S. in June, and I am so encouraged by her Scripture-saturated approach to where we derive our identities. After finding in both A Covenant of Water and the Maggie Smith memoir a theme of women chasing their creative work at all costs, I am particularly grateful for Rice’s wisdom: “While many factors shape and describe us as individual women, God alone has the power and authority to define us.” Preorder her book now (word is preorders have been arriving early).

  • From Garden to Glory: How Understanding God’s Story Changes Yours is a biblical narrative of a Bible study by my friend Courtney Doctor wrote years ago. And it’s a beautiful invitation into the whole storyline of Scripture, that we may better place our lives within it. It comes out May 7.

  • Beautiful Freedom: How the Bible Shapes Your View of Appearance, Food, and Fitness by Stacy Reaoch. Though I haven’t started this one yet, the table of contents is compelling, y’all! A biblical theology of exercise, food restrictions, overindulgence and aging? Count me in. It comes out May 1.

Listen In 🎧

My interview with Gary Chapman on his Building Relationships radio show ran in April. What a treasure to talk to the man behind the Five Love Languages about navigating our loves and losses a little better.

Find a list of my latest podcast appearances & where to order We Shall All Be Changed: How Facing Death with Loved Ones Transforms Us on my website.

1. If you have read or are interested in reading this memoir,

Stephanie Duncan Smith

is hosting a close reading of it this spring on her Substack.