The past is a terrible place to get stuck. I sometimes like to look back at experiences of my past, but I only like to make short visits. It is not a place I want to spend much time.
I am aware of how the traces of nostalgia provide content to my dreams. There is hardly a dream that does not have fragments of my past. Nostalgia flavors my dreaming, whether I am awake or asleep. Rather than adding zesty savor to my time awake or asleep, memories seem to dampen my current experience. Nostalgia shapes and limits my alertness, memories stir up anxiety.
When I seem to be clinging to memories of my past, I shy away from an unknown and unexplored future. I retreat to the past, and shrink back from the present.
It is tempting to dwell on the known and fear what is yet to come. Nostalgia urges me to cling to the worn and familiar. Memory becomes a measure by which I can judge the present. It seems like a chilling sense of loss that falls on many who enter old age.
For me, it is a new experience even if any one of my days enters into twilight. When my day slowly leaves brightness behind and slips into darkness. I want to avoid looking back at the clear daylight with either longing or regret. I prefer to embrace the unknown mystery of darkness.
I could easily take refuge in the shuttered realm of rest when faced with the bright invitation of a new, wakened morning. Each new day calls me forward into a new day of adventure, delight and discovery. Why would I choose a future that is only a reassemble of what I have known, a reconstruction of past experience? Nostalgia urges me to reach back, when I would rather lunge forward.
Life, for me, is not a merry-go-round showing me the same again and again. I would rather it be a roller-coaster, hurling me into an uncharted, unknown future. I know it will plunge me into terrifying depths and frightening heights. I know that most of that ride may leave me exhausted with delight.
To do any of it again would not be the same. Nostalgia is too numbing. It is time to turn the page and find what awaits with bright, searching eyes.