On Nostalgia

A sentimentality.

I recently found myself discussing this concept with a dear friend.  Just like every other intangible emotion that humans experience, none of us find nostalgia in the same way.  Yours will never be the same as mine.  It can manifest itself in joy or pain; in yearning for, or in regret of, the past.  Most often and logically its for your own past, but sometimes its for someone else or a time or place you never even got to experience.

Despite this, it's always wistful and romantic.  To me, nostalgia is largely a method of the mind in retaining memories, those ones that ever so slowly melt away until you think of them no more.  Your mind remembers (what it thinks to be) every single aspect of a certain situation, time or experience, formulating something so inherently unique to your own inner observations and perceptions that it is irreproducible to no one else but yourself.  That doesn't mean they're gone forever, though.  It usually just means you'll have to wait for that serendipitous moment when something years down the track, when you least expect it, brings its back to the surface. 

I find my nostalgic moments mostly in smells, or in a particular time of year.  Maybe this is because they are static; the same no matter where you experience them. My yearning for periods of time has heightened over the past few years, this perhaps more so as I get further away from them.  Mid-May, when the weather begins to chill, feels like the pangs of loneliness I felt when most of my friends went overseas; September feels like when I returned from Europe to find Spring had sprung in my garden, and I got to begin a new friendship with someone that I had to leave behind before I went away.  When I think of it I also have songs on my iPod that would fit these moulds well.  These notes of nostalgia will stick for a long time before they are replaced.  On the other hand, at the end of this year they might all culminate and neatly file themselves away as something I'll later wistful know as my undergraduate years.  Who knows.

Smells are a little bit different.  They seem to continually re-adjust themselves and build and grow in me.  I've got smells of my Nanna cooking from when I was little that I can feel slowly becoming associated with my Mum in the kitchen on a Saturday morning.  Eventually they'll become mine.  Something as pervasive as cigarette smoke, even; it smells of my time in Europe, of my first boyfriend, of nights in sticky-carpeted pubs and now, of summer nights and carelessness.  The bottle of perfume my parents gave me for my twentieth birthday used to smell so strongly of that balmy night I spent feeling safe in a dark cinema.  Sometimes it still does, but now it also smells of special occasions and enhanced confidence.

Now I read back on my words and I try as hard as I can to feel something, anything; that pull deep in my centre that used to hurt when my eyes glazed over them and made me ache for days.  It's still there now, that ache I wanted forever to end, but now it's different; it's more unsure, almost like a clock-hand paused in the middle of a second.

When I read over things I have written, however, I don't experience this same sense of feeling.  I probably won't when I read over this piece either.  I'm not sure why this is; the only thing I can possibly think of is that the act of writing enables you to expel something palpable for later on.  You've taken the physical steps to get it out into the open and it isn't just caught in your mind.  I wrote the above paragraph a few weeks ago on a scrap of paper, and there are only some things in it now that I can still relate to.  The warmth and the haze of the memory is still there.  Nostalgia, though, often creeps up on you and bursts itself open through a prompt you didn't even know existed.

Lately I've found myself pausing when I enter this contemplative mood.  Something in my mind has been wanting to turn it off.  Maybe it's for want of actually living in the present, being consciously thankful for what I have now, or not dwelling on the past.  But I've also realised all of these things are the polar opposite to what it means to be nostalgic.  After all of this, nostalgia isn't something just for dreamers, or wishful thinkers, or even idealists.  It's something that makes us human, and reminds us so when we forget.