Nostalgia Sells

Today I watched two movies from my childhood. I started out with “Ordinary People” from 1980 and later watched “The Breakfast Club” from 1985. Both amazing films in their own right, I quickly realized I was re-visiting a lot of my own pre-adolescent and teenage memories. I felt the need to reconnect, almost as if I hadn’t gone down memory lane in some time. But, the truth is that we are always going down memory lane, whether consciously or in our subconscious.

We live according to how we’ve lived in our pasts. We have reference points to which we can base decisions and help guide our actions. The idea of nostalgia comes in more as an afterthought at times. Having distinct memories that elicit elevated emotions of defining and breakthrough moments are often the ones we choose to revisit more often, perhaps for the higher levels of emotion which, in turn, make us feel more alive.

I am no exception to highly charged emotional memories. In fact, I tend to hold the highly charged memories more close in my memory bank because of their feel good or feel real capacity. Oftentimes, we act without thinking or we think without acting. I have found that if we act upon our thoughts with the intention that every moment is a potentially withstanding and defining moment we can, at that point, be more in the moment. The beauty is that we can reflect on our moments as memories almost instantaneously.