Friday, February 4, 2011

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is such a bittersweet sentiment. Approaching the third decade of my life, I realize I’m still very young to be talking about my youth in retrospect, but at the same time I’m experiencing a temporal distance in my memories that I’ve never felt before. My childhood seems so much further away than I ever thought it would, and even actions and events in high school are starting to seem like distant memories.

All it seems to take is a specific design, perhaps a character from an old television series or the logo on a milk carton to send me into an indescribable wave of retrospection. But it isn’t just an objective analysis of memories I still have; it’s almost as if for a second, my mind has traveled back to that exact period of time, and as I return to the present, the emotions of the past fade slowly like an ebbing tide. Sights, sounds, and feelings all can evoke fragments of temporary temporal relocation, but what really gets me the most, like for many of you I’m sure, are scents. A kind of food you ate in elementary school, your grandmother’s house, your ex-girlfriend’s staple perfume—these are the keys to spin you in a whirlwind of vivid lucidity.

So I’m thinking of undertaking a project, to help establish portals into my present psyche when I’m long into the future. I plan to obtain dozens of unique scents, each bottled—perhaps various kinds of unique perfumes or air fresheners—and set aside for a specific period. I’d label one for every three months or so of my life. And every time I’d come home for the day I would take that specific scent and smell it deeply while going over the day’s events in my head and reflecting on the current atmosphere of my lifestyle. Then five, ten, thirty years in the future when I’d want a passage to my 20s, I would simply be able to pluck the appropriately labeled bottle (Winter 2011 for example) and take a whiff to spiral me back to this place.

9 comments:

  1. Oh nostalgia, you so lovely.
    Well, my young childhood sucked, but I have awesome memories of, say, games I played or foods I ate.

    ReplyDelete
  2. i agree, you never love or hate the feeling

    ReplyDelete
  3. I get such bad nostalgia whenever I see old action figures that I had when I was a kid. I swear I remember every damn time I played with each individual one. XD

    On a side note, do you remember crazybones? I LOVED those things when I was a kid, and I was dicking around in Walmart yesterday and I saw a bunch of them. Apparently they're remaking them! Lol.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I love nostalgia, its a great feeling :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. When I reminisce about olden days I typically note during the conversation that I may not recall properly due to the eyes of nostalgia

    ReplyDelete
  6. This is an awesome idea you have, with the scents, a little weird, but then I'm not one to talk.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I prefer to look back with slightly obscured memories so I believe things were better than they were.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Oh no, I don't want to keep aging anymore.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I get really nostalgia when I play video games from my childhood. (Especially because I don't game anymore.)

    Also, the scent thing is a good idea... a similar thing kinda works with me, but with music.

    ReplyDelete