Nostalgia

Today, I talked to a girl I dated for a few months when we were classmates in my Master's programme in Holland. We got to reminiscing about old times and I told her how different my uni was to ISS. I had a hard time adjusting to the cold formality of my uni in England after the cuddly-familiarity of ISS, where everyone knows everyone. While I was there I found the hippie culture and the benign cliques that formed chafing, but I missed them terribly when I first moved to uni in England. Now, I am well past the phase when I was pining for ISS and I am merely nostalgic about it. Nostalgia for a place or time is actually nostalgia for a feeling, even though we are often unaware of the feeling when in the middle of it. Nostalgia paints everything in a comforting sepia hue, papering over all the ugly and tedious bits. But what is wrong with that? There is a quote from one of my favourite authors, which goes, "What is nostalgia but an attempt to recreate what was good in the past? The past has been good to us. Let us honour it in this way." I also just came across an article which talks about the benefits of nostalgia and how it is a profoundly rooting experience. It can help us tide over tough times by reminding us of the intimacy of the good times.