Dear Travel Itin:

“How can I cope with this emotionally?” –

– I’d say, for the purpose of coping with this, you need to better define what this is.

“I have always looked back at the past… and reminisced about the heydays” – if you always reminisced, it means that you reminisced before the pandemic (and then maybe you reminisced more during the pandemic)?

“It hurts me to keep recollecting the past, when everyone else seems to have moved on respectively” – if your past was pleasant enough overall, you would have moved on from it.  But there is enough unpleasantness in your past that keeps you stuck in it. Maybe the “this” which you need to cope with is that unpleasantness.

It is possible that by being nostalgic about the past, you’ve been avoiding confronting some difficult, unpleasant things about your past, a confrontation that needs to happen so that you can move on…?

anita

Hi Travel (not all that wonder are lost)

The word “nostalgia” comes from two Greek roots: νόστος, nóstos (“return home”) and ἄλγος, álgos (“longing”).

Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own phantasy. Nostalgia a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. At the same time Nostalgia is mourning and or longing for same imagine future that cannot be. The Past become the Future without a Present. And they say Time Travel isn’t possible. 🙂

“Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?” That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Nostaglgia is a kind of wound. The word wound so close to the word wonder; a wound is a wonder. Life opening and then healing itself . “Wounds” an invitation to enter into the raw and real of human life and then to wait for the wonder.

I love the wound of Nostalgia. Hearing a peace of music that sends me back in time to a memory revisited. To see how time flowed from that point. Sometimes painful lessons learned, but having learned something less painful. The wonder of the healing comes from allowing the feelings to flow.

The longing isn’t for the past or some future that cannot be but for home which is in the present. Be Present

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. – Hermann Hess