So, as you get older you find that nostalgia is your favorite guilty (or guiltless) pleasure.\u00a0 Movies and songs that showcase things from your younger days are among the happiest moments you spend.\u00a0 Now don\u2019t get me wrong, things happening in the present day can be fun and exciting and interesting for sure.\u00a0 But more and more, you become a stranger in the strange land that is the present day.\u00a0 You look around and you see that everything has changed; the culture, the people, the places, the language, the entertainment and especially the technology.\u00a0 Even the things that are supposed to be things from your time have been changed until you\u2019re not even qualified to use them.\u00a0 As an example, look at the telephone.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
So, we are experiencing the slow eradication of the world we knew.\u00a0 And if you came from a place that has been remade over the last half century it\u2019s even more disconcerting.\u00a0 Your past has been basically erased and what\u2019s left sometimes has nothing at all left that resembles the place you grew up in.<\/p>\n
So, this is all true.\u00a0 And getting angry or depressed about it won\u2019t change anything except make you feel worse.\u00a0 But recently I realized that nostalgia is a form of time travel.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Or you hear a song that you remember hearing when you were on the beach with your best girl.\u00a0 Or you go to a classic car show and see a car that you owned or was owned by a friend.\u00a0 And the memories come flooding back and you\u2019re walking around in 1969 or 1987.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Sure, it\u2019s a bit of an escape.\u00a0 And it doesn\u2019t solve any of the problems you have in the here and now.\u00a0 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\u2019re living in the happiest place on Earth; your youth.\u00a0 Now, you can\u2019t over do it.\u00a0 If you spend all day every day in the past, you\u2019ll lose the ability to cope with the present.\u00a0 And you won\u2019t be any use to people who think of now as the center of the universe.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Just something I thought of.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So, as you get older you find that nostalgia is your favorite guilty (or guiltless) pleasure.\u00a0 Movies and songs that showcase things from your younger<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3366,1263],"tags":[1321],"class_list":["post-36932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-life-in-dunwich","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","tag-nostalgia"],"yoast_head":"\n