Revisiting what once moved us isn’t nostalgia; it’s how we find strength for what’s next.
KEY POINTS
- Returning to old songs and books reveals new meanings as we change and grow through life’s experiences.
- Return isn’t regression but spiral growth, bringing who we’ve become to what we thought we knew.
- Constant novelty disconnects us from the truths that sustain us. Return rebuilds the ground we stand on.
Over Christmas, I put “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel on my record player. I’ve heard this song thousands of times across four decades.
When I listened to it in my late teens, newly arrived in America from Bangladesh, hanging out with what the song calls “the ragged people,” the song made me feel heroic. I was the poor boy, and the song made me feel like my struggle had dignity, that persistence meant something.
Listening in late 2025, I no longer felt heroic. Instead, what I felt most strongly was tenderness. Tenderness for that young man who believed he could outwork any obstacle, who thought the American dream was just a matter of refusing to quit. He had no idea what was coming—the failures, the losses, the ways life would refuse his tidy narrative.
I felt such love for him. And in that love I found strength and a light in the darkening days of winter.
And that is what returning to old things—music, books, practices, rituals—can do. It can give us the strength we need to face the new things.
Books that Change as You Change
Last spring, in the midst of a rather stressful time, I found myself reaching for my 40-year-old copy of Sadhana by Rabindranath Tagore. Translated by Tagore himself from Bengali, the book is a collection of eight essays on some of humanity’s most profound spiritual questions.
I’d first read it as a boy. Now, in my mid-50s, as I leafed through the dog-eared pages, my eyes fell on this passage:
The man who aims at his own aggrandizement underrates everything else. Compared to his ego the rest of the world is unreal. Thus in order to be fully conscious of the reality of all, one has to be free himself from the bonds of personal desires. This discipline we have to go through to prepare ourselves for our social duties—for sharing the burdens of our fellow beings. Every endeavor to attain a larger life requires of man to gain by giving away, and not to be greedy.
I must have read those words many times. But at 15 or 25, they hadn’t registered at all. Other words had spoken to me then. But in my 50s, those words jumped through time and space and lodged deep into my soul.
Yes, I thought. I get it now.
At all ages, Tagore has restored and replenished me. He has always given me what I have needed. It’s just that what I have needed has changed as I have changed, and each time I go to Tagore, he gives me something different.
When Old Songs Speak New Truths
Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” contains that famous line: “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” For decades, I heard it as beautiful but abstract—poetic comfort food. The kind of thing you put on a coffee mug.
Then my son was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare blood cancer, especially in his age group.
Suddenly that crack wasn’t metaphorical. It was the actual breaking open of everything I thought I understood about control, about fatherhood, about what I could protect him from. And when I returned to that song, I heard something I’d completely missed: The verse isn’t about cracks as unfortunate flaws that we make the best of. It’s about cracks as the necessary condition for light.
“Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering.”
Cohen isn’t saying “accept imperfection.” He’s saying perfection itself is the enemy. The pursuit of it is what keeps us in darkness. The crack—the rupture, the failure, the wound—that’s not the obstacle to wholeness. It’s the entrance.
I’d heard this song dozens of times before. But I needed to live through the breaking before I could understand what it was actually saying.
And when I did understand, it gave me exactly what I needed in the exact moment in which I needed it.
The Power of Return
There’s a difference between returning and simply repeating. Repetition is mechanical—doing the same thing expecting the same result. Return is dialogue—bringing who you’ve become to what you thought you knew.
Each return adds a layer. Not because the song changed but because I carried more life to the listening.
I think this is precisely what we lose when we’re constantly chasing what’s new. We abandon the practices, the texts, the songs that once sustained us because they feel inadequate to the moment. We stop returning to what moved us because return feels like going backward. But return isn’t regression—it’s spiral. You come back to the same point but at a higher level, carrying everything you’ve learned from the last orbit.
The culture tells us that last year’s self isn’t enough. We need new frameworks, new systems, new identities built for whatever’s coming. But when we’re constantly trying to become someone new, we lose continuity with our own history. We disconnect from the truths that gave us ground.
And then, when crisis actually arrives, we have no ground to stand on.
Return is how we rebuild that ground.
5 Ways to Practice Return
Here are five practices to help you practice return in your own life.
- Return to one song that marked a turning point. Listen properly, not as background noise, and notice what you hear now that you couldn’t perceive before.
- Reread one book that changed you, marking what stands out now.Use a different color pen. Don’t look at your old highlights first. When you’re done, compare.
- Restore one abandoned practice for seven days. Not because it “should” work, but to discover what it might offer now. The morning pages that felt indulgent at 35 might be essential at 45, but for completely different reasons.
- Return to a place that mattered. If you can’t physically go there, spend 10 minutes recalling it in detail: the sounds, the light, what you were carrying then. Notice what you understand about that version of yourself that you couldn’t see while living it.
- Ask someone who knew you then what they see now. I recently had coffee with someone I hadn’t seen in 20 years. She said, “You’re so much calmer now. Back then you were brilliant but exhausting.”
The Songs Haven’t Changed
As I listened to “The Boxer” over Christmas, I remembered that young man working late nights in the freezing cold of Duluth, Minnesota. And I realized the young man was still here, along with everything that sustained him, and those things could also sustain me today.
The songs haven’t changed. We have, and so has the world. But the old songs can still give us what we need today, if only we remember to return to them.
[Photo: Guntur/Adobe Stock]
Original article @ Psychology Today.
