Good Old Days No More!

Nostalgia, when burning and craving for the days of yore, has two eyes; regardless of its intensity or apathy: One eye that sees a point of time from which it has been plunged, the moment of remembrance; and the other that sees the time out front. In as much as looks are deceiving, we would never see the images in our world but in the back of our mind. Perhaps it is an illusionary clock to show the perspective of time, as we live and experiment yesterday’s life with today’s and today’s with tomorrow’s and so on. Reminiscencing the sepia-tinted memories as we found once in old family photographs, wishful contentment of even the wretched old days and taking delights in the sublunary actions and pleasure — on numberless hours so many times have we lost ourselves, unable to find our way out of the good old days’ retreat. And it’s hard to deny that the silly smile, in our private moments while thinking of the things, is too deep and convincing. From the old days, quite different from nostalgia, there is another matter that has captured our imagination; in general, the growth and progress of humanity. As we grow out of our primitive and parochial thoughts, we have embraced the idea of togetherness in the form of community and other higher levels of organisation as we have been monkeys no more. What really matters at this point is the overall outcome, when most of us in our group are lost in a warp of time. Even if we have dragged our feet forward like a disinclined mule waiting for the master’s whip to complete the back-breaking journey, the collective attachment to nostalgic thrill is something we cannot care to ignore. Too hell with progress. Too hell with the donkeys’ life. And we celebrate. The convention of the yesteryear. The revolutionary ideals of the inception period. The film and music of those days. Private memories, public histories. What not. This intoxication lies spreading. Just one point is enough to prove our objects of glorification exist in their truest sense: We are tired of the journey, that we ignore the present reality, that we are afraid of a brave-new-world kind of things, and that we are drowning ourselves orgasmically in the assumed cheerful old days. Now shall we feel we are happy because we have an imagined history created from the past? Now shall we believe the future depends on the past? Now shall we say we have so many greatness we can learn our lessons from, sometimes when we are not basking in the glories of the past? Or now shall we conclude — with a baggage from yesterday, a burden of today, and timidly tomorrow — we have to move forward for the sake of staying alive?