-can't you just sit a while? and try your hardest to smile.

Nostalgia is about the fleeting moments in our life. A throwback to when times were easier, play was innocent; when light actually illuminated all of the room. We hold these memories in high regard, we try our hardest to not let those moments slip away. Eventually, all that is left is a warm distant haze that leaves you wondering if it all really happened. It's like how Haruki Murakami wrote, ""Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart." I can't escape the feeling that up until the present moment, everything that's transpired over the course of many years occured while I was in a stupor. Even the present moment is deceiving. The present moment offers feelings of clarity that are dulled the very next moment. The next day it is realized that you weren't very much lucid at all in being, that in fact you are very much blinded by prejudices and emotion. The feeling of not ever being fully conscious while living in the moment accompanies me on a daily basis. Monks have long understood that meditating allows them to reduce the toll that time takes on humans. I yearn to be lucid as they are, to see things as they really happened. The past belongs in the past, it would be wrong to wish for it to be any other way. Yet I wonder, is there any way I can bring the past with me and embody it instead of looking wistfully back at it? I don't want to spend life longing for my childhood. I want to be that child, scampering through the bushes, trying desperately to fly my pale-yellow cheap paper kite, bubbling with vitality. I want to be that child at eighty. Feeling nostalgic?