Understanding Nostalgia

When it comes to thinking about the past; there are two kinds of Nostalgia. RESTORATIVE and REFLECTIVE.

Restorative nostalgia deals with the "return home" portion, making you want to reconstruct and relive the way things were in the past.

Reflective nostalgia centers on longing, letting you simmer in those wistful and yearning feelings while accepting that the past is the past. Reflective Nostalgia is safer. It allows for memories but accepts that it’s in the past and the future can be different.

When we remember loved ones; especially who may have died; many are in danger of Restorative Nostalgia. This makes them remember mostly good things about d deceased forgetting atrocities & remembering wrongly sequence of events that makes d deceased look better than they were.

Sadly, d past that restorative nostalgia urges u to recreate isn't real. U likely remember d good times out of context. Added to ur biases; Restorative Nostalgia is a dangerous feeling, which can keep u locked to a past that does not exist & judge d present by outdated yardsticks

We are all in danger of this phenomenon if we do not deliberately accept the fact that our love for people is not based on their perfection and does not have to be rational. We all have our fans regardless of how others dislike us.

Accepting the humanity of people means we can say they did wrong in an area but that we still love them regardless. So we don’t have to coat the memory of an ex or the dead in honey to justify our praise of their existence.

Reflective Nostalgia is always more pragmatic and rooted to reality than Restorative Nostalgia which keeps us in fantasy land of an imagined world.

So which past do you see when u look back...Restorative or Reflective?