Pastime paradise

Before there was Gangsta’s Paradise, there was Stevie Wonder’s Pastime Paradise. I love that song.

I listen to it when I catch myself wanting my old life back - when I hanker for the ease of making plans without thinking too far ahead. When I remember the nonchalance I had for any unexplained twinge of pain.

It’s a soft kind of longing. Easy to indulge. Easy to believe.

But just like looking to the past and wishing to “make America great again”, such thoughts are dangerous.

My life now has a line between “before” and “after” cancer. Of course it’s natural to look back, especially when cancer has interrupted the shape of my life.

The “before” can start to glow in a way it never did at the time.

We edit the past without meaning to. We smooth out the stress, the uncertainty, the daily frustrations. We keep the light and let the rest fall away. And what we’re left with is something that feels whole and safe and, above all, recoverable.

But it isn’t.

There is no going back—not to the life I had, not to the person I was before it. Even if the external details could be reconstructed, the experience of it couldn’t. I know too much now. I see things I didn’t see then. Time doesn’t fold in on itself like that.

And more than that, I’m not sure I would want it to.

Because the past, for all its pull, isn’t honest. Not completely. It doesn’t hold the full story of what it was to live it. It holds a version—edited, softened, made bearable in retrospect. Longing for it is longing for something that never quite existed as we now remember it.

That doesn’t mean the past has no place. It does. It just isn’t a place to live.

There’s a difference between learning from what has been and trying to return to it. One asks something of you; the other keeps you suspended. One moves you forward; the other holds you in a version of life that no longer fits.

The years around my diagnosis taught me things I wouldn’t have chosen to learn, but I can’t unlearn them now. About fragility. About time. About what matters and what doesn’t when everything is stripped back. Those lessons only have value if I carry them into the life I’m living now—not if I stand still, looking over my shoulder, wishing I could unknow them.

Looking backwards has a cost. It narrows your attention. It turns what you have into something lesser, because it isn’t what you had. It asks the present to compete with a memory that has been perfected over time.

And the present can’t win that.

That’s why the whole making America great again slogan is so misguided - that past version of America was built on the pain of a lot of people. The greatness came from massacres, land confiscations, slavery, segregation, robber barons, civil war, extreme economic inequality. America’s greatness or otherwise should be forward looking having learnt from the pain of its previous mistakes.

Forward isn’t about optimism, It is about willingness. A decision, made again and again, to engage with the life that is actually here, rather than the one that has already been.

I remember. Of course I do. There are parts of my life before all of this that I hold onto, and always will.

But I don’t live there.

I’m not going back.

I’m taking what I need, and I’m going forward