There are some experiences common to all of us; we all have felt the dejection of being somewhere that we are not accepted, we all have felt the jubilation of graduating a school, we have all felt the grief of losing touch with those once close to us. We all have that inevitable, irresistible, and ineluctable bout of nostalgia or wistfulness that causes us to ruminate over these experiences. Then, we make the critical mistake of trying to force circumstances to repeat. The urge is understandable, we all crave those emotional rushes. We want to experience them for the second time. Unfortunately, however, no situation ever happens twice.
Think back to your first kiss. If this isn’t applicable to you because you haven’t kissed anyone yet, don’t worry, you can still follow along with the sentiment. It isn’t a situation devoid of context. You most likely had some set of events leading up to it, such as a date, culminating in the unforgettable high of finally locking lips with somebody that you have been enthralled with. You’ve never tasted somebody before, felt the touch of lips on lips, your heart was pumping with excitement and you felt the butterflies in your stomach fly out and energize your kiss. All of this is the result of discovery, and the release of tension. It is the product of the context that produced those events and emotions. A kiss in isolation wouldn’t necessarily have those characteristics, it is what happened before, after, and alongside that kiss that created your experience.
But then we think back to that original high, and try to recapture it. We have almost certainly lost touch with the subject of our first kiss at this point, so much time had passed, and we ache for an opportunity to experience it again. But it will never come again, because the context that let us feel that way can only ever happen once. Think of this as an addiction. You only experience the original high once. It isn’t productive to fixate on trying to recapture what simply can’t be recaptured. You can’t graduate twice, you can’t learn something twice, and you can’t simply turn the clock back, especially not selectively. We can only look for new ways, or rather, new contexts, which will ultimately allow us to experience the highs we long for, and prevent us from locking ourselves in an alcove with windows that can only see into the ghosts of our past.
