Let’s talk about enjoying your past since you don’t see an enjoyable future!
I’m living in nostalgia.
I’ve been conversing with myself to such an extent that writing a blog seems vague. Hell, I had this whole blog planned. I had an outline and now I’m blank. The price you pay for talking to yourself almost always. So, yes I went shopping yesterday. Not a big fan of shopping, but at this point, it was kind of necessary, and I needed to step out of the house to remind myself that the world has moved on, and now it’s time that I do too. I guess the last time I went out was in October. Two months and I forgot how the world works. Well, not the point, so moving on, we took a road to the mall. I had traveled that road for two years almost daily. Yup, my JEE coaching was located near a mall.
Seeing that road after three years was very nostalgic. I won’t say I had a pleasant experience in those two years and while passing those buildings, I had the exact same thing in my mind. Still, I was smiling the whole time (The one thing that I’m glad about this whole pandemic is the masks. People can’t see me smiling at buildings and people on the road, and yes I’m extremely observant of things while I’m out). Currently, I’m pursuing a master's in mathematics. So on a superficial level, I kind of wasted my two years in coaching. But then I remembered if it hadn’t been for that JEE coaching, I wouldn’t have chosen mathematics (Mind you, I never liked mathematics till class 10th. It was something I studied just for scoring. I was more into history and geography). I wouldn’t have chosen Miranda House. I wouldn’t have met these awesome people whom I can call my family now. I wouldn’t have been this person that I am now.
Sometimes, I think if I could change anything in the past what would it be? The first thing that comes to my mind is my decision of preparing for jee. But, I realized there is so much to lose if I changed that. I cannot change the events that led me to take mathematics as my major in my undergrad at Miranda. I met many people along the way who changed me. Three of those people are a major part of my life now (almost my life now). I could not imagine any parallel life without them. I don’t want to imagine a life without them.
So, if I want to get out of my anxiety, I try to imagine those years at Miranda. One thing I can say for sure is that I was happy. More than anything I have ever felt (on the positive side). Even if I chose a difficult career line, I won’t regret it because of all the memories that I made (and my love for the subject but we’re trying to get emotional so never mind). I have heard people saying not to live in the past. I am living in the past. All those good moments and all those mistakes that I made, I giggle and I cry thinking about them. All the regrets, if I get a chance to undo those regrets, would I do it? “Regrets don’t leave. They weren’t mosquito bites. They itch forever.” You undo one mistake and it would lead to hundred others.
So often, we feel that we are missing so much. All those things that we could have done, all those things that we could have been, all those people that we could have met, and the list goes on. We feel the need of escaping this life and live another one, a better one maybe if only we took some different path, some different decisions, and everything changes.
“It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.”- The Midnight Library
Imagine, in some parallel universe, there is a version of you that wants the same things that you have right now. Your friends, your family, your memories, your experiences, your personality. We have a very uncertain future, and all we do in present is worry about that uncertainty. What if, for once we forget that we have a future to worry about and live in the past, try to relive what we’ve been through, how it shaped us, the good stuff and the bad too, we might realize that “We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.” And above all, we don’t need to find a meaning to life to actually live it. We have made so many memories worth remembering without having meaning to life and we can continue making more…
Conclusion: Sometimes it’s good, maybe the best to live in nostalgia, to live in the past, to feel those moments for one more time.
