Nostalgia

          I was walking down the street very recently when something profound occurred. I say profound not because the sensation is rare; quite the opposite. It is something that many people feel every once in a while. Something that I have felt a great many times. It's just that this time it hit me in a slightly different matter. I was more fascinated with it. While I trekked down the way towards the bus terminal, the wind picked up and sent the leafs of the trees close to me into a rustling fit. The scent of summer hit my nose, the sound of the rustling filtered into my ears, and for a single instant I was somewhere else. Just in that one moment of time I was walking down a dirt path out in Berwick, Nova Scotia.

          It's an interesting thing, Nostalgia. It can be a wonderful sensation, or a painful one. It can be a moment of liberation that brings back pleasant memories, or a malignant jab to remind you of something lost. Either way it is one that sort of blows my mind. I wasn't being poetic when I said that I was somewhere else in that moment. That is honestly the only way that I can describe the sensation that I felt. Your brain receives signals from your various sensory organs and every once in a while those signals coincide almost perfectly with a previous experience. Just for a second you are smashed in the face with the notion that it is all too familiar. Déjà vu. Nostalgia. Whatever you want to call it, all of us have experienced it at least once in our lifetime.

           I'm not interested, really, in the kind of nostalgia that a great many people talk about or seek out. Like watching a movie you haven't seen in a long time, or playing a game you haven't touched since your youth. These are connected, no doubt, but they are not quite as enthralling to me. It is easy to see how you might be fooled for an instant into thinking you are living a memory when you are getting the same combination of visual and auditory stimuli that you would have in the past. It's still rather interesting, but it is not quite as profound. The ones that blindside you. The ones where you smell a meal you haven't eaten in years and can clearly recall what it was like to wait in the kitchen impatiently for it to be finished. When you are staring out the window of a bus and you recall a trip you took in the eleventh grade. Those are the ones that I find are worth thinking about. The brain is a complex thing, one that I don't pretend to have a full understanding of, but all the time I find myself really quite intrigued by what it does when it's not quite working the way that it is intended. I mean, nostalgia is, in it's base, a sort of misfiring of the brain. It's an ever so brief mistake that the brain makes, when it mixes up memories with current sensations and has a sort of hiccup. But enough repeating of the same notions, the effect that it has is where there are some things worth pondering.

           I can remember where I used to hunt nostalgia rather mercilessly. I was so bemused by the present that I wanted nothing more than to live in my past, and remember times that I enjoyed. I would lay in my bed and just try to recall what it was like to lay on a different mattress, at a different time. I would wander through the woods breathing deeply and hoping that I might catch a whiff of the previous summer. This was not a healthy thing. A friend of mine once told me a quote that I have always liked, but only recently have truly begun to appreciate: “If you think that your past is haunting you, you're wrong. It's you that's haunting it.” I wish I knew the origin of it, because it's kind of profound. Profound and entirely correct. It's really easy to get addicted to that feeling of being somewhere else for a moment, but it is just as easy to start missing new moments because you are so damn focused on the old ones. And that's just not very productive at all. There is nothing to be gained from that but an unhealthy dose of longing. There is nowhere to go but forward. No direction to travel but onward. That's a notion that I feel most people should hold on to. I am certainly trying to.

~Patches