Nostalgia

Nostalgic thoughts seem a bit like fat wormy things twirling through the ethers. They don’t have fangs or long claws, because these are not necessary. They don’t need to be fast and furious to be accepted. Nostalgia is virtually irresistible and knows it. So those thoughts can be slow and lazy about coming along.

At least, until a person reaches a certain level of discernment. Before then, nostalgia worms can enter easily into a person’s thought field. They pass nearly undetected because of their sedating seduction into feeling something “familiar” that is “missing.” A person opens to this impression, falling through amnesia into the Neither-Either Land of What-Is-Not.

Neither-Either Land is a pretend place of limitless unfulfilled promises or possibilities: those which never happened and those which will never happen again. A wanderer here is overwhelmed with yearning for what he thinks can never be or could never have been.

Such visitations to N.E.L. generally happen many times. It is as though one must hope every last God-forsaken hope, and experience those hopes dashed ad infinitum, until the face of perpetual disappointment is beheld and known in every feature.

Such a stark image of hopelessness is intolerable even though, or perhaps because, it is ultimately false. The wanderer eventually realizes that anguish cannot be appeased through nostalgia, and that there is no release from the dungeon of despair until he is able to answer the following question in the affirmative:

“Do you really want to live . . . now?”

For one who is adrift in Neither-Ether Land, this is by no means an easy reckoning. He will almost certainly say, with grim determination, “No, I do not!” Because nostalgia posits that life in this moment is life without something he wants but cannot have.

And so, disappointment carries him further and further down into the realm of dissolution, where the hardened brick of impossible desires is broken bit by bit into tiny meaningless particles. When there is nothing left to hold onto, then suffering loses the power to possess.

This is the nadir of the dark night, the point at which the forces of light begin to increase. Faint at first, felt rather than seen, more of a fragrance than a vision, dawn trembles through the void.

The wanderer gradually perceives that something has changed. The seemingly endless darkness begins to wane, the mortal chill to warm, the fog of confusion to disperse.

Light brings discernment. Even a candle’s flame can make a blackened room negotiable. Shadows appear, illuminating form.

Before, nostalgic thoughts were invisible until actually felt as intrusions. Now, their wormy shapes can be seen and no longer seem inviting, but rather tedious and tiresome. Consequently they find no receptive landing place.

And with attention embracing the Now, the energy of the Present blows them away like a wind.