Nostalgia is a peculiar experience. It evokes a swath of emotions, usually positive. From walking down the street to passing by a food truck whose aroma encompasses scents of sweet, of salty, of something in between, it is commendable how quickly we are able to connect that something, even if just a sliver, to a memory floating in our subconscious from nearly a decade ago. Nostalgia makes me wonder how many of our memories relate to the specific experience or situation, as opposed to the emotions that are connected to that memory.
The book I’m reading in my English class, Black Flower by Young-ha Kim, makes me nostalgic for binge-reading all five of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series in one go at the Barnes & Noble that was a ten-minute drive from my childhood home. Leaves swirling in brown-tinted tendrils on the street on a windy day remind me of the ones I saw on a different street, maybe in a different city (though my memory doesn’t provide this detail) at a different time where all the leaves in the world seem to be swirling off their branches.
To me, nostalgia represents all that can be connected in unsuspecting ways. These connections can occur between instances that are similar or different. Coffee drips discreetly—yet not quite silently—into a pot that renders itself almost halfway full while I furiously type out my English paper due at midnight. Suddenly, I am reminded of the tendrils of steam that emit from Lorelai’s cup of coffee in that one (or maybe more accurately, multiple) scene from Gilmore Girls where she yells at Luke over something not quite that serious.
Nostalgia reaches its arms into the past, but what about the other way around? Could the license plate on the car in front of me, H-V-E-F-U-N, be a premonition that I indeed am taking on too large of a workload here at Brown and should follow my heart to solo-backpack-travel through the winding hills of the Netherlands like I’ve always dreamed of? In all seriousness, part of me wonders if nostalgia viewed this way—directed towards the future—has any real difference from that directed towards the past. Synchronicity is the tendency to perceive patterns or connections in random data. Maybe nostalgia, then, is its counterpart, connected more to the emotional, right hemisphere of our brain, offering us fleeting solace in our hectic everyday lives.
And what inherently makes this sense of nostalgia appear? Is there something in the way the leaves fall to the ground on this particular day, in dainty, crescent swaths rather than the usual staccato cascade when it’s windy, that evokes a sense of longing for this scene but at home? What should I make of these unexpected, pleasant moments that spring about my day, that often catapult my mood into something between reminiscence and melancholy for extended periods of time? Maybe, like all emotions, it is something that is meant to be celebrated as something fleeting yet oddly comforting. To me, it offers something powerful, the ability to make me feel at home regardless of the place I’m in. As a kid, I would scoff at the actors I’d see on movie screens who would get teary-eyed looking off into the distance or at some random scenery. As I’ve grown older, I actually admire my younger self for so brazenly shouldering off the most “embarrassing” moments of the human psyche. The older version of me has realized that I am not superhuman and gets teary-eyed looking at pretty landscapes sometimes, too. Nostalgia is one emotion that has taught me this lesson, keeping myself grounded and connected to my past, which ultimately shapes both my present and future.
