Not nostalgic
I have plenty of fond memories, but I am rarely nostalgic. I wondered about that this morning, and looked up the word. The shortest definition I found points to the difference:
nostalgia: longing for something past
I sorted through my memories and found an especially favorite one: the eleven years I spent playing bluegrass and old time music as a duo with my son, starting when he was fourteen. That stretch produced some major highlights of my life — singing with him, learning to perform, learning about the music business, setting an example for how to negotiate the challenges of life.
When he turned twenty-five that project ended, we had milked it for all it would ever be worth to us and he had more important goals to pursue, career and marriage and family.
Do I miss it? In a way. Being such an unusual project to undertake at age fifty, it added a lot of unexpected depth to my life, heavily influenced my character growth for many years, laid foundations for relationships with family and friends that just wouldn't have happened in the normal course of things.
Do I long for those times, i.e. would I like to re-experience them in some way? No. Those eleven years yielded many highlights, but that is what they were, highlights, bright moments that punctuated long, gray stretches of difficult and tedious effort. The rewards are precious, but the work that produced them wasn't. The rewards have stayed with me, and I'm glad to have the rest of it — the pain, the exertion, the disappointment, the tensions, the anxiety — fade in memory as each day goes by.