Recently I returned to the countryside where my parents came from, which place my mother and I would visit each summer as I was growing up. We would take a whole boring day in a car to get there and stay with my grandmother. Mum and I would visit her friends who now owned farms. While they talked I would play with their children having a whale of a time being left to our own devices, around the farm buildings, haystacks, equipment and riding bikes and pushing homemade carts. No health and safety then! But I am sure the parents must have kept an I on us without us realising. These are happy memories and arise every time I approach this area. I feel a nostalgia and the thought to return and live there, gently persists. So what is this nostalgia? I suspect it is the remembering a time of innocent childhood, uncomplicated thoughts and of living out of the present moment. To return to live there physically now, would not fulfil this nostalgia. Such nostalgia would remain elusive because it is a memory of the joy experienced out of living in the present moment. The best thing ever is to be able to return to this present moment at anytime and experience the joy and peace that the nostalgia evoked, by applying a mindfulness approach to dwell in the gap between my thoughts. This is where eternity touches time and I can experience the uncomplicated childhood mindset at an adult level wherever I am.
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I find nostalgia can often be a double edged sword as contemporaries of my generation including myself are endlessly comparing the good old days with the here & now.
I miss the simplicity of my childhood experiences sure, but it's all subjective and memories are at best a facsimile of what reality was back then.
I think it underlines the importance of living in the moment as fully as we are able.