- Elicit
I seem to experience intense feelings of nostalgia rather frequently in my everyday life. It’s brought on by the simplest or mundane of things, like the way the sun hits the top of conifers in the morning or evening, the trilling of a bird in the distance during certain seasons or weather conditions, the way a wall clock ticks away steadily in the stillness of my home (especially when accompanied by motes of dust in the sunlight), or the smell of a running air conditioner.
These moments illicit elicit both mysterious and beautiful emotions, but are hurled at me constantly. While I enjoy the feelings they give me, I seem to experience them far more often than I think most would consider normal. I don’t know if there is a term for this sense of hyper-nostalgia, or what (if anything) it’s indicative of. Most of it is tied to insignificant moments from my childhood, like lying in the melting snow on a Spring day (the trilling bird), or sitting bored in the car waiting on my mother (the sun on conifers), but a lot of it is more ambiguous.
So I thought it would be fun to ask other people what their strongest (and perhaps recurring) moments of nostalgia are triggered and/or tied to. What are some of yours?
Music for me. I listen to music a lot, so when I experience something significant or memorable, I associate it to the song I was listening to at the time. Whenever I hear the song, it takes me back to that memory.
Same. Certain songs take me back to the place I first heard them, usually walking around as a teen with a discman. And now as an adult it happens with “this song = this block of the city” where I was driving and it came on.
Same. To this day I can’t listen to Promiscuous by Nelly Furtado without being thrown back to 2006 cause my cousin had bought that CD on release and played it all the time.