The Fire Ant Ball!

Very few emotions that we as a species are capable of conceiving bear as much duality as nostalgia. You could walk into its illusion and return bruised and wounded on one day, and then, there may be days when nothing could offer you more comfort than its peaceful shores.

But what shapes the outcome of nostalgia, is it a function of your current state or the memory you attempt at revisiting, or is it more complicated than that?

Last Saturday, few of us planned on revisiting our Undergrad campus. It was meant to be a road trip, a tiny break from the caged reality that we are currently part of. None of us had anticipated what would follow once we reach there, it was meant to be just another getaway. But what followed was unexpected and had us in a rather unreal string of happiness.

I'd like to present these blurry realizations here, for the sake of debate and more discussion.

I CAN’T FIGURE IT OUT

It was nostalgia that was kicking in, but it was the happy sorts where you are consoled by the varied memories you’ve managed to accumulate over the years. It was so ethereal that it triggered a debate between my friend and me on what constitutes the most beautiful feeling in the world, his answer appeared rather striking to me for his response was – nostalgia. I’d always assumed nostalgia to be a trapping feeling which usually resulted in sadness accompanied with mild headaches. How could nostalgia even compare to other emotions like liberation and love, when all it brings is a tide of melancholy other than the one off case when it brings us calm?

I think the principal difference between any other emotion and nostalgia is the massively overpowering options it sends your way. Come to think of it as being able to perceive time as a dimension, you can go to a place and recollect all the memories you’ve created there, almost like being able to select from a string of memories on a timeline. Just like you can move right-left, up-down, forward-backward, here you can move in time and go revisit a particular memory. You can move through time, isn’t it other-worldly?

When all of us were walking through those lanes, the ones which we have traversed a thousand times over, there wasn’t just one thought that hit us but hundreds of them, overwhelming this tiny mind of ours. The outcome was this strange feeling of satiety which transpired in that undying smile on all of our faces.

A lot of people correlate the outcome of nostalgia to your current state - If you’re upbeat, nostalgia will amplify your happiness, if you’re sour, you might just be swept over by those headaches which I mentioned. 

But I don’t really believe that, I guess it’s more about how one would term his journey from that memory to the present. If that journey has been an upward curve, the memory would evoke positivity, and if that little trip is indented with periods of losses then melancholy takes over. This might seem a bit weird, but we humans don’t possess a very complex decision making architecture when it comes to forming speedy opinions, and comparison is an easy abstraction of a complex problem, so when you get a particular memory the easiest thing for us is to stack it right against the most easily accessible other memory which is, in the case of a lazy processor, our current state.

If you can ascribe something positive to that spent time then nostalgia strengthens you, else it just weakens you and may leave you wretched.

IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT THE PEOPLE

Another realization that dawned on me during this trip, and was in complete dissonance with what I’d believed earlier was - it’s not just about the people. For me emotions and feelings were all about the people I’ve lived them with, the people I’ve shared good times with. 

I believed the same set of people are capable of evoking the same emotions in you, independent of the place. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. The place, as I know now, too is a contributor in that equation which determines our emotions. Had that not been the case, then the same set of people whom I set out with would’ve made me feel the same at any other place, but it was only at that particular place the same set of humans began to wield magic all at once. The place matters especially when you’ve spent half of your adult life there.

Now what has been mentioned and brought forth before you can at best be termed as hypothesis formulation. This is what has been running through my mind since some time, and in absence of any other soul to share it with and a work life to sustain, I thought there is no better way to let it out in the open for a discussion than posting it here. 

Inviting some feedback and counter arguments.

WHY THIS BROKEN PIECE OF LITERATURE?

At times a blog is more a means of self-expression, an attempt at reiterating few things to oneself than something meant for the consumption of masses. It could also be a way to seek clarity by reaching out to others and this is precisely what is happening right here. 

I guess this is the first one of such incidents, happens when you haven’t quite written anything in more than half a year.

Next time, it’ll be better!