Days That Were: A Short Series on Nostalgia

You still crave lemonade, but the taste doesn’t satisfy you as much as it used to. You still crave summer, but sometimes you mean summer, five years ago.

I read this quote somewhere and I thought how perfectly it captures the emotion of Nostalgia. It is a quite complex paradoxical emotion and hence we say it is bittersweet. Sweet as we are reminiscing the best times of our lives and bitter because we realise it no longer exists and we must return to the present.

It got me thinking why do we reminisce the ‘good old days’?

It's a question with myriad answers, as triggers for nostalgia vary widely from person to person. It can be objects, pictures, certain places, sensory experiences like smell, taste, etc. These might just be a surface level reasons why we get nostalgic. These triggers might make someone experience nostalgia during times of change when we lose someone close to us, when we move away to a new place, when we are graduating or getting married, or any other reason of a shift in our life.

Our unique personalities and our current state of psychological well-being impacts how we process nostalgia and that is what makes it all the more fascinating. So why do we feel this discontinuity? It might be because of lack of social connectedness or a lack of sense of purpose and meaning to life or a lack of security in current state.

Hence, at the heart of this emotion lies self-continuity stemming from the discontinuity we would have experienced in our current circumstances. Nostalgia assembles and arranges episodes in our life and helps in sense-making. It acts as a measurement for us…how we track the progress we have made in not only our lives but also in the lives of others close to us. To become a butterfly, a caterpillar has to live as a chrysalis first. Maybe one remembers those days so dearly because one is going through the chrysalis phase again and those memories tag along with a message to ponder and make sense of things around us.

Made on Procreate

To buy artworks or get custom artworks created, visit www.payalmaloo.com/shop or write to us at shop.payalmaloo@gmail.com