At some obscure hour of
At some obscure hour of the night last night, I wrote the following, but was having problems connecting to Blogger to post it. Part one of a series, I suspect:
Sometimes the middle of the night seems like a time of bleary misery, and others, one of great clarity. Tonight feels like the latter.
I've been sitting here for the last hour reflecting on this huge nostalgia-kick I've been on for the last couple of months and where it comes from, and what I can get out of it. I'm not sure I have answers, but I think I do have more questions.
Firstly - what has triggered it all? Partly I think it's to do with a couple of people from my past having reappeared in my life, which inevitably has triggered thoughts of the specific memories I associate with them - mostly the happy ones - unavoidably some no so happy. Pulling those individuals and their connected incidents out of the tangled mess of memory is both a rewarding and enjoyable experience, but it only goes some way towards explaining the overall range of reflection and nostalgia I've been experiencing.
I think that what's happened is the culmination of a few years of build-up to a point where the dam bursts and the memories come crashing down. In the last few years, I've had many conversations with people (Chris especially, but others too) about the impact of my childhood experiences on who I am now, and whether I should deal with some of the issues relating to those experiences with a view to improving on the person now. So now I'm up to my eyes in thoughts about home, school, family, the things I did, the things I felt. And it's literally a flood - I can be dragged along by a current of school memories and then suddenly get hit in the back of the head by a passing piece of family-angst flotsam. It's very disconcerting, and not a little disturbing.
It's also a little annoying, because I don't have much opportunity to discuss it properly with anyone who shared in it all. The family-angst stuff threatens to create an entirely new generation if not addressed with ferocious delicacy, most of the school-memory people I haven't spoken to in 20-plus years, and even an entire years-long swath of early adult relationships stopped dead a few years ago for various reasons; (and the bolshy bugger in me won't let me go running back after those involved, even if I wanted to, which I don't think I do).
So, as I'm stuck in the nostalgia-flood, at least for the time being, how do I make sure I get something constructive out of it. Learning from the past so as not to repeat it is a valuable starting point, but it's all very simplistic. Don't we really need to learn from the past because if we don't, it was just wasted time? It seems that the aim to take out of this period of involuntary recollection is to work out what I *did* learn from my past.
So what's that?
Probably best left for another day........