< It was an easy time.

~emptything

Nostalgia can be honeyed poison; so sweet to taste, yet you know it's probably not healthy. I suffer from this too, although "suffer" is a word probably too severe to apply to sentimental reminiscence. For a long stretch I've been doing the most peculiar things to satisfy this desire to roll back down the decades: playing music from that time, watching shows from that time, even (and I know this is going to sound odd), scouring YouTube for commercials from that time. There are entire playlists composed for people like us, hungry to return to a point where we had fewer responsibilities, more freedom, less stress.

The irony in all this is that in so doing, we may be exacerbating it. Now and again it's good to recall how good things seemed to be, but let me ask: in all your happiest memories, are you pining for the past? Are you wishing you could go backward? Nope. Probably in the memories that make you happy, you're alive, full of zeal, focused in the moment and the ebb and flow of activity. Perhaps it was trite, trivial stuff you talked about: but you were talking, engaging, fully involved in what you were doing.

We need more of this: focus, on the present moment, right now. This is actually one of the tenets of Buddhism: live in the moment. Don't fret for the future (which has not and will never come); don't yearn for the past (which is gone, you can't have it back).

It's difficult to get back into. Focusing on the present is very, very hard once you've lived long enough; the accumulation of all this emotional flotsam and jetsam colliding on the inside of our skulls is noisy. But I promise you, the best way I know to punch out of this funk, is to focus on something in the moment. It could be something sensory; take in all the little details of every crenulation of a flower's petals, trace with your eyes the spiraling patterns of wood grain on a table. Decide to do something, and do it: that's what you did when you were young, and you were happy. Taking too much time to consider and ponder over the past can retard your progress in the present.

"Who lives in the past misses the present and shall have no future."

I wish you well.

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~abacushex wrote:

Beautifully said. I have been a Zen Buddhist student, and I have developed an aversion to nostalgia, the only exception being that good music never gets old.