Travelling through time
From the middle of England, this is the voice of random and relaxing ASMR.
Remember – I love to hear from people who are listening to this. Leave a comment and let me know where you are in the world, or ask me a question, or suggest something for me to discuss. I’m here in the middle of England – where in the world are you?
If we think of time as a linear concept, we appear to be going forwards as we inhabit the days of our lives and get older.
This gives rise to the notion of time passing somehow, like something moving, and the idea that we ourselves are moving through time. We live our lives at the leading edge of time, between the future and the past, and even if we don’t do anything at all, the world is going around, time is passing and we are moving into the future and leaving the past behind.
What we leave behind can be called history, whether it is the history of the entire world, or just our own lives.
When we get nostalgic we go from our point right now, at the leading edge of life and we think back to, or we remember, or we experience emotionally what it was like “back then”.
But whenever or whatever “back then” was...it was the leading edge of our life, just like this moment is right now.
This yearning for a different time, but just another ordinary moment fascinates me because I get nostalgic for so many times in my life, but I have rarely been aware at these times that I was bookmarking something special for the future. I was just living my life.
So if “then” was just as everyday as right now, why do we look back to “then” as being more worthwhile of our thoughts and dreams and passions than right now today?
Of course we’ve all had times where we’ve felt on top of the world, but one can so often be nostalgic about absolutely the most uneventful times in our lives, and we can even have nostalgia for times when things weren’t going so well (as opposed to bad memories of an upsetting time).
So why is the pull of nostalgia so strong – how is it that it can throw us back into the past with the simplest of prompts? Just a melody, or the faintest scent of a perfume.
Why do we give into nostalgic daydreams when we could be living in the moment, the same moment that will become a nostalgic moment one day in the future when it’s tangible meaning has gone from our lives?
It baffles me, and yet it goes on and on, safe in the knowledge even that what I am doing right now...will one day be a memory.