There is a hollow emptiness that seems to accompany me each time I find myself staring out of a window for too long. This hollowness emerges when my focus gets lost beyond a fixed point on the horizon or when I'm feeling lulled by exhaustion after too many days of functioning at 100mph.
I most often feel this when I'm in a plane thousands of feet in the air, on a leisurely bike ride/walk and especially when I'm sitting out in nature or under the night sky.
As I'm writing this I'm realizing how romanticized and dramatic this is all sounding but that's exactly the feeling I want to get across because the feeling I'm talking about is nostalgia.
We all know it, some of us love it, some of us live it and others of us loathe it.
As I'm getting older, I'm beginning to realize that I become more and more nostalgic as the years go on. I suppose this is a good thing because it means I'm living moments worth returning to. But then again, sometimes the memories are more painful ones that at one time brought me immense joy and happiness but now, because they are gone, elicit that previously mentioned the feeling of emptiness.
The word nostalgia actually comes from two Greek words meaning "returning home" and "pain."
In my interpretation, nostalgia is essentially returning home to a previous piece of ourselves.
It wasn't until recently that I really began to acknowledge the fact that while nostalgia can be joyous and euphoric, it can also be incredibly painful.
In fact, beginning around the 1700s, nostalgia has even considered a disease that evoked severe homesickness often experienced by soldiers at war. There are even reported deaths caused by nostalgia as a result of the severe depression some of these men were experiencing.
I find that I often try to push down any feelings of nostalgia because I feel as if they're eating away at my present moment and causing me to miss an opportunity to fully absorb whatever it is I'm presently doing.
However, most of the time, we don't ask for these memories to flood back into every inch of our bodies; they simply waft through the kitchen via the smell of freshly baked cookies or float on the rhythm of an old blues song you used to listen to as a kid.
Most of these memories are dormant until they're unlocked by either a positive or negative trigger and we realize we've forgotten so much of the life we've already lived.
In my opinion, I think nostalgia is a way for our minds to reconnect and try to understand who we are. Since we aren't our names and we aren't our jobs and our external circumstances are continually changing, I imagine it's difficult for our consciouses to grapple with figuring out who we are.
Nostalgia is an incredibly powerful feeling that serves many different purposes.
I suppose I've been feeling extra nostalgic lately for whatever reason and I wanted to use this as an opportunity to process those feelings and my understanding of them.
As part of that understanding, I've realized that by asking someone about nostalgia and the types of feelings and memories they experience, we can tap into a personal piece of who they are.
So, next time a wave of nostalgia wells up and washes over you while you're sitting quietly or blankly staring out a window, surrender to it. Nostalgia does not have to be inherently bad.
After all, if the smell freshly baked cookies are triggering your memories, it sounds like your future might involve a few sweet treats to munch on while you reminisce.