Nostalgia is a fiction, that things were
never as bad as they are right now - that the good old days were simpler,
nicer, better. But that fiction becomes affliction when we lose the ability to
remember the right and wrong of days gone by, like carefully posed family
portraits that hide the bruises of real-life nostalgia amplifies the
obscenities of today's pain and strife. It strangles us with a constricting
embrace that warmly presses the nails of shattered dreams deeper into out flesh
- killing us tenderly and with a reassuring smile that somehow this could all
be different.
But it can't.
This is reality and nostalgia is the dream.
The dream of family vacations and Sunday morning brunches. Dreams of happily
ever after and till death do us part. It's the blue pill that keeps us trapped
in the same cycle of numbed conformity day after day chasing after a life of
fantasy that never existed in the first place. Nostalgia is the opiate of the
soul It turns terrorists into martyrs and good men into monsters; it lies to us
and we like being lied to.
But Jesus said the truth would set us free,
so I'm choosing to take off the shackles of nostalgia and take a walk in the
courtyard of my present circumstance. Because If I have the courage to open my
eyes and recognize the blemishes and lines of an imperfect past perhaps I might
just find the courage and the strength I need to face this trying hour with the
wisdom and grace those lines and blemishes imply. So I'm praying for a
liberation from nostalgia, I'm praying for my eyes to be opened wide so that I
can still tell the difference between joy and pain, between trial and blessing,
to know the difference in the past so that I may recognize it in the present. I
want to remember the sting - the cutting of flesh and the breaking of heart so
that I may know what it means still to be alive, in the present, and not just
in my memories.
Nostalgia is novocaine and I’m quitting
cold turkey.
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