Nostalgia

The most beautiful feeling of nostalgia that I ever experienced was over ten years ago. I had been trying to resolve questions in my mind that had been left unanswered in my Masters thesis. I was using this blog as a notebook to help me do that. I lived in Newtown in those days, so it was a reasonably short walk for me to get to the University of Sydney, my alma mater. I wanted to go to their Fisher Library to get a library card to let me borrow books from their library again.

I started at the Wentworth Building, and walked across the campus to the Fisher Library. While I was doing that, and looking at the buildings as I was walking by, the nostalgia hit. I felt all of the good things I had ever felt while studying there, and none of the bad things. And I just thought, if I actually felt this way at the time I was actually here, I never would have left!

But that's what nostalgia does: it protects you from the pain of the past. It let me, in the present day, simply enjoy this experience for the good it was, and disregard the rest. And as long as you are aware that that's what's happening, there is no problem. It is when people mistake this phenomenon for an accurate account of the past, and start to yearn for the good old days, that the problem occurs. The grass is always greener on the other side, and it is all too easy to sentimentalise yesteryear. Perhaps that is one of the things that can make old people bitter. Thinking how much worse the present has become, and how little they can cope.

No, I left this place for a reason, and I have not forgotten that.

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