Constants

Written by Ankita Ganguly

Edited by Bipasha Bhattacharya

The world is constantly changing, bringing in new ideas, changes, difficulties, troubles that every individual faces. With the transitional world, it is often the case that humans want to turn to something they are aware of, something that is known to them, something that they find comfort in. We long for something that we are familiar with and often try to turn to our past. However, the past never waits for us and before we know it the present moment has also passed. This is why we long for something that could act as a portal for us to return to our past, something that is familiar to us, something that provides us with comfort, something that stays constant.

We are constantly encouraged to live in the present, make good memories, and work on the betterment of our future. It is true that the present and future provide us with endless opportunities that might be better for us, that possibly are extremely challenging but may have better outcomes, yet often when we struggle and are overwhelmed with work, emotions, thoughts, anything at all, we try to turn to our past. The photos that we took, or our old school where we would grumpily make our way to, every morning, or friends who have been with us since fifth grade, these constants, in a way, act as a link between our present and our past that we truly miss that we took for granted.

This feeling is called the feeling of nostalgia. It helps us connect with our past and relive our memories. Nostalgia, as I have mentioned, can bring us comfort or the longing for our past. Nostalgia can be triggered by anything, a particular smell, a particular song, or any place that may have memories attached to them. There is a Portuguese term which is ‘saudade’ which means the love for something that is most likely to never return. It could be an old friend, an old lover, a place that was of importance in your life, maybe it could be a past version of yourself. How we perceive nostalgia depends on our state of mind at the time. During nostalgia, these constants really help us to connect with our past selves. They provide us comfort.

For example, to me the road that connected my apartment to my school is something that when I visit, I cannot help but long for the good old days I have had there. Just cycling around with my friends in the afternoon with Taylor Swift playing on our phone speakers while chatting about how our maths class was in fairly sunny weather; or the photos and memories me and my friends recorded of us in our first semester, being just absolutely clueless about how university would go for us. Turns out when under stress, these pictures and videos really do provide an escape from our stress and provide us with an escape to our past.

However, a very interesting thing that we may not realise is how due to increasing technological advancements, we have our constant right with us all time, in our mobiles. We don’t realise but all the photos and videos that we take are often just us trying to document and create different gateways to our past.

Nostalgia is similar to waves, it washes over us and retreats. We need to realise that our past is something that is controlled heavily by our present. The moments we go through in our present, is eventually something that becomes our memories. So it is important for us to live through these moments in entirety so that when we look back at them we can enjoy the times we spent.

Andy Bernard from The Office said it the best “I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them.”