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Time for another blog post! Welcome back and happy Easter. Another eventful month, full of new experiences, travels, and memories. This past month has revolved around feelings of nostalgia and the good old days.
I had the opportunity to go on a safari and I took it. It felt like the pinnacle of being in Tanzania. In my head that’s the peak of what living in Tanzania can be—maybe aside from hiking Kilimanjaro. I got to check a lot of things off my bucket list. I saw wild lions, hippos, elephants, antelope, gazelles, crocodiles, monkeys, and so much more. I needed a safari outfit, so I decided to wear a suit!
Recently my school welcomed a few new teachers. This has been especially exciting because they are much closer to my age than the current teachers. Within the first couple days of their arrival I was tasked with accompanying them and showing them around. First, we stood on a street corner and ate fresh peanuts together. Then we went searching for another teacher’s house. Naturally we got lost within an hour. Even though I was far from the greatest guide, it was fun getting to spend the time with the new teachers.
I frequently compare my experiences in Tanzania to those in a cartoon, and this month was no exception. My school headmaster has been working on building a shack to house a corn husking machine. For installing the roof he called on the help of a local craftsman (fundi). The fundi showed up and got to work. Burned into my memory now is the image of the “professional” handyman standing on a roof nailing down corrugated sheet metal while wearing flip-flops.
While on the topic of fundi, there was another I saw while on a hike. This fundi was tasked with building a viewpoint for a lake that is about 1.5 km from the nearest road. As a result all the cinder blocks were left on the road and this fundi was making trips back and forth to the build site, carrying all the cinder blocks by himself two at a time. There were hundreds of cinder blocks left to go. There’s some kind of anecdotal poetic meaning here to note, but I’ll leave it to the reader to discern it.
How quickly I forget feelings—both physical and emotional. The other day it was sunny for the first time in a couple weeks. I’ve been around long enough to know that clear, sunny days feel nice, but still they surprise me every once in a while. This can be a blessing on the nice days, but maybe a curse on the cloudy days. Like the feeling of the sun, nostalgia comes and goes, especially being as far away from home as I am now.
“Nostalgia - A sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past.”
I experienced my strongest feeling of nostalgia in years. Maybe ever. I got called “Matt Wong’s little brother” for the first time in a long long time. It was completely unexpected. There has been a former Peace Corps Volunteer traveling through Africa and he recently arrived in Tanzania. He has been staying with current Peace Corps Volunteers and I offered to host him for a couple nights. Little did I know that we had not only a shared hometown, but went to the same high school. He even knew my brother. It was a crazy coincidence. The simple label “Matt Wong’s little brother” took me back and unlocked this part of my identity that I hadn’t thought about or remembered in many years.
This past month I installed the game StarCraft to the school computers so that I could teach the students to play and give them something fun to do as a part of IT club. Installing and playing this game—which was such a huge part of my childhood—brought with it such strong feelings of nostalgia. It was nice remembering not necessarily “happier” times, but happy times.
“My childhood home I see again, And sadden with the view; And still, as memory crowds my brain, There’s pleasure in it too. O Memory!”
A rarer form of nostalgia I’ve been experiencing is nostalgia for the present. For the past few years I’ve been blessed enough to recognize the good old days as they’re happening. I guess that’s how we got the corny quote about today being a gift, that’s why they call it the present. That being said, appreciating the present in this way comes with a bittersweet feeling of missing things before they’re gone. This feeling for me manifests itself in not finishing great books, not finishing video games, not saying goodbye, and holding on to things for longer than I should.
With the theme of nostalgia this past month, my interest was piqued and I started reading articles I could find on feelings of nostalgia, and this brought me to studies on the psychological perception of time. This may be familiar to some readers, but I’ll give a quick summary. The idea is that your first year of life is 100% of your life at the time. Then, your second year of life is only 50% of your life, your third year 33%, your fourth 25%, and so on until you die. This is frequently used as an explanation for why time seems to fly by as you get older and why childhood feels so formative and long. Assuming a life span of about 80 years, over 3/4 of your perceived life has passed by the time you’re 20. In theory, this year—my 25th year of life—I will experience what feels like 4% of my life so far. The 20s can be a bit of a paradox because people tend to feel the most nostalgic for their childhood during this time as they enter a period of transition to adulthood and have new and uncomfortable experiences. However, later in life people tend to feel the most nostalgia for their 20s when they feel nostalgia at all.
Visual representation of your perceived life.
This may seem depressing, looking at the picture and thinking about the good old days and better times. All is not lost. Many studies conclude that psychologically, time is perceived slower when we experience new things. I urge the reader: reject comfort, reject the good “old” days, embrace new experiences, enjoy the good days while they’re happening—because they’re happening all the time. This is not to say to forget the past, but to remember to appreciate the present. Nostalgia is one of my favorite feelings, and I think that’s just evidence of a life well lived so far.
“How does it feel?
To be on your own, with no direction home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone”
Thanks for sticking it through another blog post with me. I hope it was everything you wanted it to be and more. More than anything, I hope it made sense and we learned something together. Wear a suit on a safari, wear flip-flops on the roof, play StarCraft in Tanzania. Do something new. I wish you a happy Easter, and I’ll see you next month!
Love,
Ryan
Wang, Y., Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Wu, M., & Cai, H. (2024). Trajectory of nostalgia in emerging adulthood. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 50(4), 629–644. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672221143241
Hammond, C. (2017, May 3). Why time seems to slow down in emergencies. BBC Future. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170503-why-time-seems-to-slow-down-in-emergencies
Peterson, D. (n.d.). The Local Yarn: This is your life. The Local Yarn. Retrieved from https://localyarn.us/main/this-is-your-life
Burkeman, O. (2019, October 22). Why does time fly by as you get older? The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/oct/22/why-does-time-fly-by-as-you-get-older