Recreational Time Travel

So, as you get older you find that nostalgia is your favorite guilty (or guiltless) pleasure.  Movies and songs that showcase things from your younger days are among the happiest moments you spend.  Now don’t get me wrong, things happening in the present day can be fun and exciting and interesting for sure.  But more and more, you become a stranger in the strange land that is the present day.  You look around and you see that everything has changed; the culture, the people, the places, the language, the entertainment and especially the technology.  Even the things that are supposed to be things from your time have been changed until you’re not even qualified to use them.  As an example, look at the telephone.  If you had handed a smart phone to a person in 1970, they would have no idea what it was but they would definitely deny it was a telephone.

So, we are experiencing the slow eradication of the world we knew.  And if you came from a place that has been remade over the last half century it’s even more disconcerting.  Your past has been basically erased and what’s left sometimes has nothing at all left that resembles the place you grew up in.

So, this is all true.  And getting angry or depressed about it won’t change anything except make you feel worse.  But recently I realized that nostalgia is a form of time travel.  You get to use your memories and some touchstones (like people, movies, photos and music) and travel back to a magic place where you were a kid or a newlywed or a happy parent but definitely in the older world where everything was familiar and you were at the center of the universe.

So, you might be watching an old movie and suddenly a bus is moving down a street and it triggers memories when you were living there and were on an identical bus and you think of a day when you took a bus ride that was involved in an important event in your life.  Or you hear a song that you remember hearing when you were on the beach with your best girl.  Or you go to a classic car show and see a car that you owned or was owned by a friend.  And the memories come flooding back and you’re walking around in 1969 or 1987.  And your older relatives are still alive and none of your friends have moved far away and everybody you care about is a short ride away.

Sure, it’s a bit of an escape.  And it doesn’t solve any of the problems you have in the here and now.  The country is still overrun with illegal aliens and gasoline is almost $5 a gallon and your bones are really creaky but for a few minutes or an hour you’re living in the happiest place on Earth; your youth.  Now, you can’t over do it.  If you spend all day every day in the past, you’ll lose the ability to cope with the present.  And you won’t be any use to people who think of now as the center of the universe.  So, I plan to use it sparingly and save it for special occasions where I can share it with the other survivors from the golden age.  Just something I thought of.