Right now, with the pandemic known as COVID19, we are experiencing a situation that was totally unpredictable for many of us and perhaps many of us are feeling nostalgic and yearning for a calmer time in our lives. In order to manage this feeling, it is important to understand that it is a common response to big changes. Instead of getting stuck in the past, appreciate the feeling in such a way that you remind yourself that there will be more moments of happiness in the future, but that they will be different because you will have overcome something that currently seems impossible to overcome. The reward will be a new way of understanding and appreciating happiness. Take your time to adapt to the new reality and try not to get overwhelmed by making comparisons between the past and the present, and just seek to take each day at face value.
All of us have undoubtedly felt nostalgic at some point in our lives; hardly anyone is immune to this feeling. Nostalgia is a feeling that usually manifests after the loss of a loved one, in the midst of a big change in our life, or when we are facing difficulties or emotional pain. Oftentimes, when we are going through a difficult time, we begin to feel nostalgic and long for days past that in our memory were much happier. We cling to those memories in a desperate attempt to rid ourselves of the sadness we feel or in an attempt to refuse to face the problems we have in the present. Sometimes we want to find the answer to our current problems by looking to the past instead of living in the present. Nostalgia is not something negative in itself, but we must learn to understand it in a way that helps us to move forward and not get stuck in the past.
We can learn many things from the past and while it is true that it can help us analyze the present and understand we have arrived at where we are now, we must remember that each day brings new gifts and challenges and it is not very useful to cling to moments that are already behind us because they prevent us from moving forward. The past is undoubtedly the starting point from which we can analyze how to move forward in a difficult moment but it should not be in any way something that we long for so intensely that we do not open our hearts to everything that is to come, the bad and the good. Life is a series of ups and downs and perhaps in your memory, you have already forgotten that in the moments that you remember as the happiest in your life, there were also extremely difficult moments. However, with the passage of time, what stays with us in our memories are the happiest ones. Whenever we start to feel nostalgic, our memory seeks to protect us by getting rid of the negative aspects of the past and in general, we are left with only the positive. Life does not always follow the path that we expect but we must remember that when the dust settles, and all of this is a distant memory, the positives will outweigh the negatives.
