When new year brings nostalgia, is it okay to romanticise it?
In the process of navigating through the faces of nostalgia, we took a walk across the city on one of the coldest days of this brand new year, 2 January
When the countdown to the strike of midnight began on the night of 31 December, I saw my whole life leading up to that point flash before my eyes.
Every first stroke of paint on a thick paper, every teardrop washing over the gel-penned letters scribbled on my journal and every goodbye song sung until the end of 2024 took me to a nomadic point of madness, drowning out the blasting sounds of firecrackers bustling across the rooftop sky that night on New Year's Eve.
Life as I knew it led up to that point, that view of the sparks of technicoloured horizon and a bated breath while the crowd cheered louder. Then a pause. And then came a barrage of luminous circles with converging lines that looked like they were going to land on a plant or a tree or a person. But we weren't afraid.
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Why is it that when we were under the open sky watching the fireworks, we got lost in it but we knew in our hearts that the noise was hurting everyone else, perhaps trying to sleep at home, and yet this was our guilty pleasure?
Arms wide, only the view meeting our eye, all our senses blurred out in the background, with the gust of the cold wave driving chills down our spine, we celebrated. We welcomed an intangible spirit of a future encapsulated by resolutions — one pledged to restore self-respect, another enforced priority to health, and another made a silent wish on a leaf that got blown away by the wind.
When the celebrations died down, and upon returning home, the aftermath of an after party hit, it was time to reflect. All alone between the four walls of my bedroom and I was bombarded with a feeling of remembering and sadness, a combined doom they call nostalgia.
Even in that sentiment, there's a certain dichotomy with something called "reflective nostalgia" which dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. On the other hand, there's "restorative nostalgia" which protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.
According to Psychology Today, reflective nostalgia accepts the fact that the past is, in fact, past, and rather than trying to recreate a special past experience, savors the emotions evoked by its recollection. This acknowledgment of the irretrievability of our autobiographical past provides an aesthetic distance that allows us to enjoy a memory in the same way that we enjoy a movie or a good book.
If you play a song that reminds you of someone precious at 2am, reflective nostalgia would be more likely to make you reach for an old picture of the two of you tucked away somewhere in your Google Photos drive, evoking in you a momentary sense of emotional pleasure rather than a restless urge to recreate a special moment from your past, and a sense of sadness when you realise the futility of that desire, that special moment, as it was lived, being forever sealed off from the present we inhabit.
With reflective nostalgia, it is the very fact that an experience is sealed off from the present that makes it a source of pleasure. Like a favourite movie or book, it possesses an aesthetic wholeness that allows us to savor it again and again with no nagging uncertainty about how it will turn out.
But restorative nostalgia is a feeling of longing for the past that involves idealising and romanticising it. It's associated with positive feelings and a desire to relive special moments. It tends to emphasise what was familiar and stable, while ignoring negative aspects. It can motivate people to seek out new experiences.
So, if you've ever been triggered by a song, smell, or photo, your mind was taking a restorative approach to bringing back the memories.
In the process of navigating through the faces of nostalgia, we took a walk across the city on one of the coldest days of this brand new year, 2 January.
What if we were to embrace this ambivalence and resort to experiencing the state of nostalgia that is, say, romantic? This is not to say we are thinking of an ex. But it is the act of remembering the past with fondness while overlooking the negative aspects. It can be a positive emotion that helps build relationships, but we can be careful not to allow this road to lead to unrealistic expectations.
So if you are reminiscing about the past, wishing things were simpler or easier back then and that they could have turned out differently, you are not the only one. We've all all been there once or twice.
