Sometime in the early fall of 2021, I wrote, sitting on a bench in Pagan Park:
The waft of mental filth roams with me through the park. It is a space without its personal memory. It is merely a collector. Like most spaces, it prompts the memories of those who wander within its confines. The babe without a single drop of remembrance would swim in the nostalgia of all that came before.
I soaked up myriad musings stretching back to the dawn of the universe as I sat on that bench. I was the babe without a single drop of remembrance. I absorbed and penned a novel about the collective consciousness of every being that ever crossed the perimeter of the park. I experienced once again that one must remind oneself to clear the mind completely when traversing a space one has traversed before. If not, the danger of letting one’s own past interfere in the current moment looms.
What I was trying to say, surely, in a non-elliptical tangle, was that it’d be groovy were the park an accumulator of memories from all that traversed it. A container of sorts. Given that, I’ll write about something tangential to it.
Nostalgia is the danger. I’m as susceptible to it as most, though I’d like to think that I see it for what it is and attempt to set it aside. It may cocoon me for a time, but the cocoon is fluid and flows around and eventually away.
Nostalgia is the danger. Making decisions based on nostalgia cuts life short. One intentionally enters into a loop or even a devolution. I hear talk time and again of the way things once were and the good old days. Do those who speak truly want to regress to a time before without the knowledge they have gained in the meantime? I would hope not. But the commoner maps out life in well-defined blacks and stark whites. The latter are the times to regress to. The former are what said human has learned in the meantime, to be tossed aside, surely.
Nostalgia is the danger. And surely a conduit to loss.
I long to return to places I’ve been before because of past contentment, or what I perceive from this point of view in time as past contentment, though the reality may have been something else altogether. I’m not immune to viewing the past through barber-pole phaser coloured glasses. But time and again the reality of those returns is not the happy-land I’d imagined.
The pull of nostalgia is intense, and within resisting it is where the reward lies. It’s time-worn to claim that living in the past is detrimental, for sure, and I posit that the darker spaces I mentioned a few paragraphs prior shape our current state much more than the complacent epochs of contentment. In the end, it’s no surprise that I believe that moving forward is always the best option.
