My new Kids in the Hall (Season 5) boxed set has taught me that wistfulness about a happy past is better than regret about an unhappy one.

The weather has been pretty damn good this month, which is a lucky thing as November here can be a real crap shoot. Last year around this time, we were suffering under highs in the -20s and snow and icy, icy roads; this year, nary a flake (maybe more than nary, but not much more) and I still have not unsheathed my “real” winter coat. So I took the opportunity to take the long walk home after Brian and I had a predictably great lunch at Lina’s Italian Market. That’s in the Tuxedo Park neighbourhood straddling NE and NW Calgary on Centre Street, and the walk home is, oh, 3.79 miles, according to this very cool pedometer that lets you map walking or running, or any, really, route and it calculates distance as you enter “legs.” Very, very cool.

On the walk home I bought season five, the final season, of Kids in the Hall. I already own seasons one, two, and three–somehow four has eluded me–as well as both their Same Guys, New Dresses and Tour of Duty  concert DVDs, their film, Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy, have seen them twice in concert (January 2000 at Massey Hall in Toronto and May 2002 at Northlands Coliseum in Edmonton), saw Bruce McCulloch in Letters to Wendy’s (which as far as I can tell has never been performed outside of Calgary), and accosted Mark McKinney at the corner of Bloor and Bay in TO. So yes, I am a fan. KITH were part of what attracted me to Canada before I ever met Brian. I’d watch KITH marathons on Comedy Central and was over the moon when they used to show two- TWO!- episodes of KITH in CBS late night Fridays. When the show was cancelled (or when the troupe decided it was time to end it- it was never “cancelled” per se), I was mournful.

That was in 1995, and of course  they are still kicking and still performing. I never got to see a show taping (having met Brian and made most of my sojourns to Toronto after the end of the show), but I did, as you’ve seen, get to see them live twice. And thanks to the fact that every bit of broadcast for KITH and pretty much everything else is available on DVD or through the efforts of some intrepid archiver on YouTube, I can relive those happy moments over and over again.

Or can I?

The fact is, reliving the past can be damn depressing. I can never recover what it was like to see these shows for the first time. My epic voyage to Germany struck home the idea that one cannot, as Heraclitus pointed out way back when, stand in the same river twice. I’ve blogged before about how the home and the home town where I grew up no longer exist. Things change. Cities change. People change. The happy memories of yesterday become faded memories of a decade ago. And so we sometimes revisit the past with a sense of melancholy, because we can never fully recover the experiences that we’re trying to recover, or simply to remember.

So yesterday we were watching some travelogue pap on the Food Network, Rachel Ray telling us where to get the best cheap Mexican food in LA or something like that, and I lamented about how I just want to travel more after recovering from a trip, but I was depressed that my recent memories were already shuttling into the past, ever further. So maybe it would be better to not have any special experiences at all, and to never have that sense of melancholy that I get to a paralyzing degree sometimes. I must be the only person who cried when he found this video on YouTube:

Why? Well this was part of my childhood and now I’m 43 and am going to die Quisp- and Quake-less, I guess.

But this is the thing: would it be better to never travel, never take risks, never partake of the lotus when it’s offered? A life without pleasure would, it would seem, be a life without that ache for a happy past. Best never to be happy, right?

And then it hit me like a tonne of bricks. Hell, no. That would be a life full of regret. And I know that the regret that I do feel–regret, for example, that I might have chosen a career different from the one that I pretty much settled on when I was 18–is not bittersweet. It’s just bitter.

Wistfulness means that you were happy, maybe more than once. It’s a blessing.