Nostalgia

I almost feel it necessary to start this off with a definition of what nostalgia means but the cliche would surely force me into a state of cringing. To avoid that awkwardness, I’m going to start off with a throwback. Ten years ago, I would’ve been eleven, and my sister was twelve. We would walk back from school together, and after the twenty-minute walk that seemed like a lifetime, we would finally make it home. It wasn’t until we both had our after school snack that we would go outside to play. We would grab just about every stuffed animal we could fit in our arms and lay them outside in the front yard on a blanket and spend the next two or three hours until mom came home and made us clean up for dinner. Nostalgia today is defined as a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically being a period of happiness.

This specific time in my life is one I like to look back on quite frequently. It takes me back to a simpler time when I didn’t have to worry about finals coming up or writing three thousand word essays for classes. The bit of nostalgia I get from simply going back to these moments helps me escape. It seems that there are so many instances where people use their nostalgia to help them just as it helps me; they are able of escaping reality, if only for a moment, and going to a time that makes me individuals happy and helps them calm their thoughts.

Nostalgia has been referred to as a stress reliever by many professionals. When I was having a hard time sleeping due to stress in my first year of university, my therapist suggested that when I catch myself lying in bed awake, just staring at the ceiling, or going through my thoughts a mile a minute, to take a deep breath, close my eyes, and think back to a time when I remember happiness and simplicity. She said that while she was in school she had a professor who based his life on simplicity; he would always tell his patients to throw themselves back into their innocent childhood memories. Doing this, he would say, is a way of calming down patients by making them use their brains to think about a time they want to go back to. It would boost their moods because, when the exercise was over, they had just spent the last few minutes thinking about a time of pure joy.

Although this is mine and many others way of handling stress, Harvard Business Review put out an article, “The Nostalgia Trap” and they called nostalgia a dangerous disease that could trigger delusions, despair, and even death. This can certainly be the case in some extremes; if someone is looking back at a very traumatic moment in their life than they may possibly put themself in a state of relapse. This is a confusing way to view nostalgia, but back in the day it wasn’t seen as looking back on the “good ol’ days”, it was seen as a sickness.

Speaking from experience, once you’ve been through a traumatic experience if you ever find yourself looking back at the moments that brought you the most panic, anxiety, or stress it’s almost as if by thinking about it, you are physically putting you back in those moments, and you feel as if you’re reliving it. When I was in grade ten, my dad had a near death experience when his small intestine burst, and my mom and I weren’t home to help. Whenever I look back at the memories I have of going to see him on life support in a dimly lit room, I get the same sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as when it first happened. The surgeon told us that if my sister hadn’t gotten home to find him screaming in pain and called the ambulance when she did we would’ve been having a different conversation. Tears are immediately testing my strength to hold back and my stomach feels as if it’s on one of those big slingshots people naively choose to ride at amusement parks. So when experts say that nostalgia has the chance of potentially being harmful to people is respectable and I think it takes a strong minded person to be able to handle those situations maturely and not go into a state of regression. I don’t believe that once someone experiences a traumatic experience they will ever be able to “get over” it, no matter how much time has passed, I don’t believe that time heals. I believe time makes it easier to live with, you’ll never be able to ever fully forget something that had such a major impact on your life but I do think that you have to opportunity to take the memories you have of that time in your life and turn them to good use. That’s usually how good Ted Talks are inspiring aren’t they?

Looking back on your childhood is what a lot of people say should be easy to reflect on and immediately feel a sense of euphoria. The Daily Utah Chronicle put out an article, Examining Our Culture of Nostalgia and author Gavin Swanson writes “our childhoods define what we will come to like, dislike, find important, and unimportant.” Children are like sponges, they take in everything they see, hear, and touch and come to the simple minded conclusion of whether they approve or not. Swanson continues, “as adults the desire to throwback and experience nostalgia is a popular trend.”

Have you ever noticed how most conversations you have with people somehow always end up with you reminiscing with the people you’re with about the “good times” you had together. As adults it’s not that we run out of topics to discuss and just resort back to nostalgia, it’s that when you bring up good memories from the past it always tends to lead to positive discussion and snowballs into making new memories.

Swanson continues to talk about nostalgia in a way that makes it easier to accept it as a positive in people’s lives rather than a negative. Things in the past that have been proven to bring good endorphins always seem to make their way back into our lives. Swanson writes about how popular Disney animated movies have been remade into live action films. He says that there have been some negative reviews about this theory saying that it’s just that Hollywood has gotten lazy and has run out of ideas but on the contrary. Beauty and the Beast was one of these among others that have been announced to be remade into live action, and the film made a profit of $1.6 billion in the box office. That number alone proving that people respond positively to nostalgia, I can vouch for this scenario since I did go to the theatres to see it eight times. My desire to pay to see this movie more than once comes from the present translation of nostalgia.

I remember when I first got the notification that Disney released the teaser trailer for the live action of my favourite princess, Beauty and the Beast. I watched the trailer about ten times and got chills everytime. I remember being filled with anger when I saw that the day it was going to be in theatres was six months from the day. I shared the trailer on every social media platform, I wanted to make sure that I did everything I could in my power to spread the word of this masterpiece. I lived the rest of those six months in anticipation for the film, and when the day finally came where I would get to finally see it opening night I became a twelve year old girl again. It was as if every time I saw the opening scene it brought me back to when my sister and I would watch the animated version on VHS over and over again.The film was everything I wished it would be and so much more, it exceeded every expectation. It quickly became one of my favourite movies and still is to this day. Whenever I find myself lost in my thoughts or find myself wanting to watch a movie to pass time, or make me smile I always reach to Beauty and the Beast. This way of being in nostalgia I am able of escaping reality for a life full of romance and catchy songs.

When people try to define nostalgia for its literal Greek translation of homecoming and pain it is easy to see why people instantly connect nostalgia with a negative meaning, but overtime the definition of the word nostalgia has changed drastically. It is most easily explained as having sentiment for the past. The Morning Journal News relates nostalgia to a yearning for your past and the “good old days” or a “warm childhood”. They go on to explain what brings on nostalgia, although it is a throwback to your past and it can be almost as if watching a scene from your life play out in your head, Tara Westover from the Denver Post writes that nostalgia can be brought on my touch and smell. Some feelings or scents are strong envokers of nostalgia due to the processing of these stimuli through the emotional part of people’s brain. Westover lists the ways that nostalgia affects people, “improves mood, increases social connectedness, enhances positive self-regard, provides existential meaning, promotes psychological growth.” Nostalgia improves one’s mood by igniting feelings of warmth or coping. It increases social connectedness because nostalgia sometimes involves memories of people you were close to, which will lead to that person feeling social support and connections. Nostalgia enhances positive self-regard because it is often used as a coping mechanism and helps people to feel better and themselves. Nostalgia provides existential meaning when it initiates a desire for people to deal with problems or stress and positively correlates to one’s sense of meaning of life. Nostalgia also promotes psychological growth because it makes people more willing to engage in character developing behaviours and it encourages people to view themselves as developing characters as well. Nostalgia can be seen as a deception because it may lead people to avoid specific things because of the memory that it brings back, it can also be seen as a comfort because by reliving past memories it may provide an contributes to mental health, and finally, nostalgia can be seen as a political tool because Westover found experiment results that stated politicians are able of provoking the social and cultural anxieties and uncertainties that make nostalgia especially effective as a tool for persuasion.

Back in the seventeenth to nineteenth century nostalgia was treated much differently. The Atlantic put out an article, When Nostalgia Was a Disease written by Julie Beck who wrote, “French doctor Jourdan Le Cointe thought nostalgia should be treated by ‘inciting pain and terror’”. This was during the Thirty Years War when soldiers were diagnosed with nostalgia. He would buried soldiers alive who had this ‘condition’ and it quickly became known as a serious disease that needed to be “scared out of people”. When soldiers were diagnosed with nostalgia as a horrible disease, it was seen as a state of the mind that kept them from performing on the field and they were seen as brain washed by the past and unable of living in the future.

Imagine being alive during that time, think about how much of your life is lived in nostalgia and then out yourself in a time when you would’ve been considered sick simply for just having a longing of your past. That’s ridiculous! I have lived my entire life looking back on my past, and there are so many people I know that I guess would’ve just been buried along with me.

I have grown up always thinking about my past, it could be something as simple as the embarrassment I can’t seem to shake when I think about the time in grade seven when the guy I had a crush on was chasing me around the school yard because one of my friends told him I liked him. His entire friend group started chasing me and it became a pack of lions chasing a lone glozell. When they caught me, which in all honesty didn’t take that long, I was laying on the ground with my feet in the air and my face in my hands. I remember kicking my feet like I was trying to shake spiders off of myself but I was really just trying to make everyone go away. They got the message and left me alone. I spent the rest of day pouting and the embarrassment has never seemed to go away from that moment.

Thinking about my past can be childish like my ‘humiliating’ encounter with my crush or it can be something a bit more serious like the story I told early about my dad and his near death experience. I can feel the tears building up and I still get chills when I think about what the doctor said about literally saving my dad. I can’t imagine a world without him and when I look back on those days spent in the ICU with my mom I can understand why people might call nostalgia a bad thing.

Nostalgia can be used for more positives than negatives though and by using it in a healthy way it can benefit your future. People always say the same cliches, “history always repeats itself” and “your past will come back to bite you” but if you use your past history to learn from and build up to your future than you my friend, are confidently able of using nostalgia to better your life. Everyone remembers the movie Butterfly Effect? I really hope you do, and if you’re in the hopefully small fraction of people that have yet to see this cinematic gold than I suggest you make a block of time dedicated to watching this classic. This movie is a perfect example of nostalgia, it connects right along with society and in the film the main character is able of traveling back in time and he tries to make the future better by changing something in the past. If only I could go back in time and just talk to my school crush instead of trying to out run him and all of his soccer teammates maybe my level of embarrassment would be nonexistent.

Since I was little I could always remember planning out my wedding, girls please tell me I’m right in saying this is normal. I’ve looked at all of my parent’s wedding photos and while they’re reliving that special day I wasn’t there for I think about how I want my special day in the future to be like. I want the colour scheme to be purple, green, and white, and I want the ceremony outside but the reception inside at a nice hotel, and when I think about mine and my imaginary husband’s first dance I think about us dancing my parent’s first dance, Here and Now by Luther Vandross. It’s a seemingly small moment in your life but it’s one that I will remember forever hopefully only once, and I want it to have a special meaning.

Planning for your future is hard when it’s so unpredictable, you can plan for it your whole life but then something you didn’t take account for happens and it may change your entire blueprint. Using nostalgia can help you learn from anything you have gone through to help you better prepare for the future. Sometimes it may be a bad memory you go back to in order to save yourself now, or it may be a good memory that brings you back to something or keeps you on that same path.

Thirty years from now, what will people look back on and be nostalgic for? Is there anything new today that creates nostalgia for people in the future? Maybe the new Marvel movies coming out, but even those are movies based on nostalgia, maybe that movie where the girl falls in love with a fish but that was also based on a bit of nostalgia, maybe the current elected president will save America from making the same mistake again. There’s got to be something better out there that I’m missing. But as of right now I’m still waiting on that big moment or that big block buster that will make me nostalgic for the early 2000s when 2050 rolls around.