A wise man, Andy Bernard, once said “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve left them”. Okay, he wasn’t actually a wise man. He wasn’t even a real man, but a fictional character on a TV show. However, that doesn’t diminish the importance of what he said. It is in fact, a remarkably profound statement that denotes every moment of nostalgia we’ve ever felt. It’s a beautiful word, nostalgia, but it is also a major reason why many of us resist change. A comforting feeling of being in a familiar environment with people you love, who doesn’t like that. It would be difficult to trade that for anything. But nothing in life is stagnant. Life in itself is a process, from the moment a dead part of the universe decides to become something else, something that has no purpose, except being able to experience some part of itself, for sometime, before it becomes a part of itself once again.
Being in a continuous loop of sweet memories, would therefore be of little use to us in the long run. Trying to find beauty in everything is fruitless. It’s not all beautiful. It just is. Beauty, like nostalgia, is a dicey word, one that makes me cringe. Through all the suffering this world goes through, beauty is a word that doesn’t belong. It’s a part of a fairytale. When you tell yourself something is beautiful, you feel bad when that thing no longer exists, when there is no reason to be sad at all. There wasn’t any beauty in the first place, it was just something rather than nothing.
It is true that this deep emotional connect to the past events and things that we feel is part of what makes us human. A creature of this universe, just a little different than the rest. A longing for what was, and a hope for what could be. It’s also what destroys us, force-feeding memories of happier times, making it difficult to come to terms with reality (not that we know what is real and what isn’t). It takes enormous strength to move on when this nostalgic feeling pulls you back, threatening to swallow you whole, but there is no other option. We, like all other living beings, are bound to suffer. There is no stopping it. We can feel sad and angry about it, but that’s all. It all seems so unreal that our mind already knows this, and yet for some reason it still much prefers to live in denial. There is no justification for when pain in purposefully inflicted on someone, but sometimes, there is no cause to pain. It comes and goes, and sometimes stays a bit longer. In the end, it all ends. Flesh, bone and all, reduced to atoms, with memories being all that remains, in some other dimension, with rows and rows of glass orbs like the one in the department of mysteries, but instead of what’s coming, it shows what once was.
Let’s save this nostalgic longing for that day, when there’s nothing else left to experience. Until then, let’s just limit it to a quiet evening, with a cup of tea and a quiet breeze, once every few years, like a long lost friend with whom you catch up. Let it not be a constant companion to you, or when you reach the end of this turmoil one day, you’ll be left wondering if you actually ever lived.
Ps :- there is an Andy in every one of us, full of heart and desperate for attention. Let him come up to the surface sometimes. He might not be so bad after all. Keep him in check though, he has a tendency to go overboard.
