Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from January, 2017

In defense of nostalgia tripping

Journeys of any kind—physical, mental, virtual—are multilayered things. There is the experience of the present, in terms of the stimuli of the immediate; then there is the remembrance of the past, the paradigms and the vocabularies that frame the way we see and respond to these stimuli; and there is the anticipation of the future, the steps we need to take to further immerse ourselves or shift direction, along with the wondering about what it all means. Further we are all constantly narrativizing our lives, plugging moments of existence into a storyline, imagining the way we will be read on social media, and shaping the retelling of our journeys to provide coherence to the ongoing script of the self. Maybe the yearning for coherence and meaning forces such a perspective, and who am I to argue with that, being as culpable as anyone else in this project of self-making and self-presenting? These past few months have been particularly poignant for me in relation to this pro