Nostalgia

I’m having one of those weeks where I want to do the things I enjoyed when I was young. I guess it’s what people talk about when they talk about their inner child. Mine has never been that repressed, but it’s still nice to enjoy a little nostaliga now and then.
It’s like having a craving for your favourite food, and it feels so decadent to indulge yourself.
I think I must not be the only one who is thinking back to times that, to us who were seeing the world through a child’s eyes, seem like simpler times. And I guess they were simpler times, before Facebook, Twitter and having my own mobile (how grown up) meant that I wasn’t constantly in social contact, but it seems like everyone else is like me, too. We want to watch Transformers remakes, and buy t-shirts with quotes from The Goonies or Dirty Dancing. My friends and I have waxed lyrical over Predator and Over The Top (no joke, a film about Sylvester Stallone trying to save his kid through winning arm wrestling competitions).
I think for me, deep down, it’s more like a healing process. I feel like some people miss a time when they had less responsibilities and could indulge their immaturity. I was never someone who felt like this was a burden. I never felt that way. I feel more like part of me wants to remember what it feels like to dream. To feel like life is an adventure, and that the choices are ours. Like life is our own creation.
Doing the things I loved before does give me that. I’ve been pretty good at chasing my dreams, more than most. I don’t give up. If one path doesn’t work to get there, I’m not afraid to forge another, a better path. Even if it’s one that no one else has taken. But life still takes it’s toll, even on us Dreamers. We are surrounded by naysayers, and people who don’t always wish us well. Dreamers have to put foundations under their castles in the air. We have to struggle to pay rent. We have to come close, and watch the big break, the one that was meant for us, slip through our fingers, and rise up again. We have to question ourselves, find out how much we can take, and fight to get what we’re worth. We have to constantly stretch our boundaries to do what we are driven to do.
I guess that sometimes, in the liminal times, we can return to that state of play, and just recharge by being, by playing. When we get a moment when we’re not wearing our armour, we can dance, paint, and be playful. And I guess at those times, returning to the archetypes of our childhood, when it was socially acceptable to believe that anything is possible.
To remember that we can do anything. Maybe we need to return to those things sometimes, when worrying about the rent becomes too stifling.