PLAYING IT AGAIN

Nostalgia is often driven by regret and it is part of the human condition that much is often regretted, especially in later life. But on the positive side, the realisation of regret usually means there has been deep change within. To regret means that a new angle has been taken on a previously seen issue or era. This is evolution at work, though it is often not a pretty sight.

Nostalgia and regret are natural. More than that, in moderation they are healthy. Unavoidable in those who are aware and sentient, they are the hallmark of maturity - emotionally, mentally and spiritually. Why then do we fear and judge the looking-back process so much? It often means that some learning curve, some previously imponderable part of the process is now digested. This process is of course sacred to the individual, because it’s their process and nobody else’s and only they can understand and judge it.

In the process of synthesising, remorse goes from being merely a thought or a mental attitude and moves into the realm of emotion, it becomes an all pervasive part of the body and the consciousness. It then may feel like depression or desperation, or even anxiety. But not all nostalgic remorse is recognised as such and can be disguised as other things. We will actually do anything at times to avoid the realisation of what is truly going on with us. We will allow in the simpler emotions, like anger or fear or jealousy, rather than the more complicated ones because those are like ongoing symptoms of a rare disease - hard to understand and even harder to treat.

Unfortunately, we tend to think emotion always requires action of some kind. And it doesn’t! It often requires only recognition! Sometimes it is enough to recognise what a feeling means or to understand it through our imagination and the reflective process (this is why meditation is helpful).

Remorse itself is often upgraded to something too sophisticated, disguised by other symptoms and conditions, such as overwork or mental exhaustion. It lags behind tied to the trunk of the vehicle and slows down the speed and the efficiency.

Looking back now and then is good, it’s the right thing to do before we move into the future. The balance of the past with the movement to the future is the way life takes us forward. But this balance is the hardest thing to get right. If the devil is in the detail then the clues are in the nostalgia. More of us currently are having increased regrets, increased remorse. We are at a stage of our evolution where more is available ... more information, more stimulation, more experience and more of everything. Human nature being what it is we want to do more, see more, experience more! Someone once said ‘the only things we regret are the things we haven’t done’ . The glut of experience, stimulation and development on offer to us now is overwhelming and hard to comprehend.

Nostalgia and regret for the past could be happening at a faster rate because of the heightened vibration of planetary consciousness and our need to gain a certain pitch of understanding. Thereby living in all the tenses - past, present and potential.

It’s heady, it’s addictive, and it isn’t about whether it is good or bad or preferable. It is about the perception of life here on earth. The culmination of our ability to understand that nothing is lost: once it has become airborne in mind or consciousness and action it is part of a forever, an eternity of facts and issues stored or housed in something which has various names - the akashic records, the collective consciousness, the universal mind - for this notion of a giant cosmic computer is not a new one. It is as old as time.

To not forget is to occasionally remember, and to remember is to pull out the emotions along with the memories. Nostalgia let’s you know you were actually part of something, that you actually have a history and a basis to where you’ve been and who you are. The occurrence of things like Alzheimer's disease might actually be to do with the shedding of an overload of remorse from a subconscious perspective. It may actually be concerned with a release from remorse which has concretised, or become unrecognisable by the feeling nature, and can only be dealt with by the memory. This is only a theory. But the presence of remorse and regret are real within the human condition. We should deal with feelings and emotions as they arise, and often we do not. There is not time, or there isn’t an appropriate space in the schedule.

We have to be very adept at personal development to stay constantly in touch with ourselves, but nonetheless that is what we should do whenever possible. What we can’t deal with in any given day or in any particular moment may come to us later in a fest of nostalgia, which may contain remorse or regret. In the movie ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ based on the French 18th century novel by Choderlos de Laclos one of the characters is heard to say that ‘regret is an essential part of happiness’ This is much like saying that driving too fast is a gamble with death in which life becomes more appealing because it is threatened.

It may be a moral and philosophical choice to see things in that way but it is also based on a peculiar and subtle grain of human truth.

L.S.

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