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Sometime in the early fall of 2021, I wrote, sitting on a bench in Pagan Park:
The waft of mental filth roams with me through the park. It is a space without its personal memory. It is merely a collector. Like most spaces, it prompts the memories of those who wander within its confines. The babe without a single drop of remembrance would swim in the nostalgia of all that came before.
I soaked up myriad musings stretching back to the dawn of the universe as I sat on that bench. I *was* the babe without a single drop of remembrance. I absorbed and penned a novel about the collective consciousness of every being that ever crossed the perimeter of the park. I experienced once again that one must remind oneself to clear the mind completely when traversing a space one has traversed before. If not, the danger of letting one's own past interfere in the current moment looms.
What I was trying to say, surely, in a non-elliptical tangle, was that it'd be groovy were the park an accumulator of memories from all that traversed it. A container of sorts. Given that, I'll write about something tangential to it.
Nostalgia is the danger. I'm as susceptible to it as most, though I'd like to think that I see it for what it is and attempt to set it aside. It may cocoon me for a time, but the cocoon is fluid and flows around and eventually away.
Nostalgia is the danger. Making decisions based on nostalgia cuts life short. One intentionally enters into a loop or even a devolution. I hear talk time and again of the *way things once were* and the *good old days*. Do those who speak truly want to regress to a time before without the knowledge they have gained in the meantime? I would hope not. But the commoner maps out life in well-defined blacks and stark whites. The latter are the times to regress *to*. The former are what said human has learned in the meantime, to be tossed aside, surely.
Nostalgia is the danger. And surely a conduit to loss.
I long to return to *places* I've been before because of *past contentment*, or what I perceive from this point of view in time as *past contentment*, though the reality may have been something else altogether. I'm not immune to viewing the past through barber-pole phaser coloured glasses. But time and again the reality of those *returns* is not the happy-land I'd imagined.
The pull of nostalgia is intense, and within resisting it is where the reward lies. It's time-worn to claim that living in the past is detrimental, for sure, and I posit that the darker spaces I mentioned a few paragraphs prior shape our current state much more than the complacent *epochs of contentment*. In the end, it's no surprise that I believe that moving forward is *always* the best option.
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