Nostalgia

For the first time in 8 months, I went back home to Pittsburgh. Paired with the excitement to see my family, there is always an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia every time I exit the Fort Pitt Tunnel and the skyline takes my breath away. A few weeks away from turning 24, my mind immediately flashes back to being 17, the age at which I had convinced myself that I had the world all figured out.

I felt like I had all the “answers”, yet I was ridiculously lost as every other teenage girl is. Looking back, the electrifying feelings of belonging and lawlessness is often juxtaposed in my mind with confusing feelings of heartbreak and navigating one’s self esteem. I bring this wash of old emotion back into the present because 7 years later, I find myself constantly asking questions about, well, everything.

Sitting on my best friend’s high-rise balcony in downtown Chicago, wine glass in-hand, we began blurting questions out to the skyscrapers as if they would answer our 20-something-year-old, existential crisis.

 “There are so many people in the world – why haven’t we found just one?” “Why are you looking when you know that there are so many people that you’re bound to find one eventually?” She looked at me, lit cigarette dangling off the railing, and tilted her head in contemplation.

“Are we wasting our 20’s, the ‘golden age’, by giving up our freedom one 90-hour work week at a time?” “What does freedom and agency even mean if it feels stripped away by our own doing?” Our kid minds battled our adult egos, right before our eyes.

We then pondered, in silence, the words of two white, female investment bankers raised on middle class money and privilege. “Is there irony in a person that has been given everything their entire life feeling like they need to give the resulting success up for happiness?” I kept this question to myself.

As I finished the book referenced in my previous post (When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödron), the author circles back to the principles of meditation:

“Opinions are opinions, nothing more or less. We can begin to notice them, and we can begin to label them as opinions, just as we label thoughts as thoughts. Just by this simple exercise, we are introduced to the notion of egolessness. All ego really is, is our opinions, which we take to be solid, real, and the absolute truth about how things are.”

For the longest time, I have erred on the side of writing without an opinion, or at least one that may be contentious in an effort to avoid judgment from others and therefore my own insecurities surfacing. This idea of thoughts being thoughts, opinions being opinions, and questions simply being questions, has allowed me to remove the fear in releasing these words into the world.

“We can let those opinions go and come back to the immediacy of our experience. We can come back to looking at someone’s face in front of us, to tasting our coffee, to brushing our teeth, to whatever we might be doing. If we can see our opinions as opinions and even for a moment let them go, and then come back to the immediacy of our experience, we may discover that we are in a brand-new world, that we have new eyes and new ears.”

There is an earth-shattering consciousness that comes with watching our thoughts and emotions come and go. On that balcony I felt comfortable and supported yet entitled, embarrassed, and sad. Relax with groundlessness. Treat your demons with compassion. At the end of the day, nostalgia is just nostalgia, and while I’m the most confused I’ve been and lack quote on quote “freedom”, I’ve been spending way more time lately with another emotion, contentment, even in the midst of all the chaos.