god forbade...must reading

Nostalgia

    No matter how hard we might want to relive what once was so vital to us and in us, the past is irretrievable. The gulf between what is, and what was, can never be bridged. It's a part of our historic self that can be revisited, at will, but again and again, must be said goodbye to.

    The foundation of nostalgia is bittersweet. However delectable the memory, the very taste of it is, yet, tainted by the vaguely unpleasant scent of longing, or regret. The realization, the indefinable sadness of life's finite essence is slowly slipping away from us. Each look back subconsciously reminds us that there's that much less to look forward to, the sand in our hourglass trickling even lower. Our lives that much more used up.

    There's the inherent grief to mourn what was once valued, cherished and clung to. 

 

    It's all past now, that time, that place, that newness, that exquisite freshness and delight. Sure, you can treasure it but you're not granted the liberty to restore it. You may re-capture small particles of its original immediacy, in your imagination. . . but always at a remove. The memory doesn't and cannot mirror what was once felt with the same pleasure or intensity. Trying to recover, or reconstruct, what at first may have felt more real than real may, in the end, make it ever less so. In a sense, we all live in exile from the past.

Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D.

in Evolution of the Self

Psychology Today