From Nostalgia to Insight

 Any casual attempt to look at the past, sparked by a specific sensory input, brings up certain memories that are evoked, memories you can visualize in clear, vivid detail, accompanied by an intoxicating, bittersweet feeling that they exude. These tinted memories are as strong as they seem because they’re packed with unprocessed emotional content. Because of their volatile nature, they don’t just sit there; they slowly seep into the subconscious, and slowly but steadily, they grow more salient, triggering cognitive biases. The contents of the memory, highlighted by the mind’s focus, pull you in, so you end up chasing the emotional impact left behind by the memory after its occurrence. Now that the mind is cognitively biased, tuned to scan the variables in your environment for those little triggers that resemble the memory, it tries to look for, recognize, find, and make patterns like the ones that happened back then in the memory. When looking back at it, even just a glance gives a little hit of that same emotion. When people try to relive it in their memories again, they’re attempting to lick their wounds, keeping the memory alive.

So why not just try to relive it again physically by repeating those patterns, hoping to feel it once more? You actually do this subconsciously, but fail on both levels because finding yourself in the same situation is difficult with the transient nature of the world. As humans, we account for so many details to get aligned, all those tiny threads that need to match up, plus most of the processes are being done subconsciously. This results in diminishing returns on the emotions because of the iterative attempts each time, realizing that things can’t align themselves like they did back then anymore.

This stuff from the past can be better analyzed through journaling or just keeping an account of the general scope of actions you’ve taken over a long stretch of time, divided into small segments. Once you can see your output—years of life—distributed in small time spans, you spot the repetitive patterns, and you start tracking them back to when it all kicked off. All those events carry the whiff of when it first happened, that original scent of the moment. See it from a non-emotional perspective, step back, and actually see what has worked on a crucial level. Formulate archetypes from your own life, draw inspiration from art—the works we’ve churned over for years—and distill insights from the mess. So it should be a wise choice to stay a level disconnected from the past. Don’t be a slave to it, don’t let it chain you—just have a retrospective outlook.

From the present’s perspective, the past looks tempting. Everything back there is certain, has been tried before, and is locked in place. However much you try, its influence—the familiarity of it all, every thought, every idea you can outsource to the past—will stick around, and the desire to live up to that intoxicating feeling sticks around too. It might not be perfect, but you still get a little bit of that feeling, a taste of it. Because of all this, the experience of the present is ruined by all the excess baggage brought around by the past, dragging you down when you’re trying to live now, making the present insufferable. Then comes this urge to push the present to just become your past—so you’re living in the present only to make it a past, to turn it into something you can look back on, something that fits the pattern, something that feels familiar again.

Now, to go somewhere from here is to head into the future, and the future is just uncertainty. Our job as humans is to either stay away from uncertainty or try to make the uncertain certain. The former is stupid, and the latter is like looking for a light switch in a well-lit room with blinders on, which may or may not exist but certainly doesn’t matter.

The only place that remains to go to is the present. The present is experientially a very thin moment in time; each passing moment consists only of sensory perceptions, the conscious experience of a being, devoid of past and future. The past includes the whole of your self, as your identity is completely based on it, while the future is better left not to bother with. So this place to find yourself in, the present, is one of pure perception, seeing no boundaries, just pure being, to simply observe with pure equanimity. Perhaps in this thin slice of eternity, we might catch a glimpse of a thread that can unravel the paradox.