01/29/2026
POST-NOSTALGIA
How was my 2016?
If I dug out the photos from the endless cloud storage — today’s faithful servants of memory, what would I have seen?
A younger me, energetic and happy. Breathtaking events, eyes bright with expectations. Relationships and people now lost — bittersweet nostalgia closes its bony fingers around my heart. There is no way into the past.
But wait, what did I not see? Pockets full of immaturity and mistakes that my current self would NOT have made. Better ways to do things. All those opportunities still open today, someone exceptional, who simply wasn’t there ten years ago.
Our memories shape our personalities, make us who we are. But they are like layers of clouds that, when viewed from the ground, create the sky’s mood for the day. Climb up high to look at just one layer — and you lose perspective. The mighty tree trunk has many growth rings inside, but each one of them does not make the tree on its own.
We need our memory in order to know where we stand and what our next steps are, be grateful to those who have helped and nurtured us, and carry forward the experience. There is no sense in unfolding a moment in the past and getting stuck in it, drinking its sweetness… and most probably omitting the unpleasant moments. Hey, by the way, those awkward situations, those failures that we tend to hide timidly even from ourselves… They are in fact the source of new understanding and growth, provided right conclusions are drawn from them.
Okay. Forget it. Uncork a bottle of nostalgia and let it sweep you away into a dreamy state… and notice the flowers of your present feelings, that need to be cared for with inexhaustible attention, start to wither. See your plans lose color, see the loved ones become more distant. You are the one who is falling down into the past.
I tell myself: stop looking into the past, look at ten years from today. What will you regret not having done if you spend your time reminiscing about old photos? Then what are you waiting for?
Ukrainian Federation of Yoga
Yogis Without Borders