Tag: writing

Connections

I love Cape Cod. The season doesn’t matter, but late summer is often a great time. There’s less traffic and a more laid back atmosphere. The beaches and wharfs hold less people, though there are those hearty souls who continue their routines swimming parallel to the shore.
I watch the few on the beaches, most in their chairs, some sitting or lying across a large towel. Others are involved in conversation or quietly engrossed with a book in hand.
You can always count on walkers tracing their steps first one way, then on their return trip to a starting point. The most jubilant are often a dog and its owner. They’ve waited for the moment when the beach was available to them and their joy is clearly displayed. This is the kind of connection that’s about as simple and straightforward as it can get: get out and spend time with good friends, family, your dog—even yourself.

The men enjoying their cocktails aboard a boat speaks of many types of connections: family, work colleague, college room mate, best friend, and so forth. Between the “remember when….did you hear….whatever happened to…” are those moments of hilarity, some brought on by something long past, others in more recent times. Nostalgia connects with the present.

I love the Cape, especially for the many connections its made for me.

Fade-free nostalgia…

What is it about nostalgia that some of us cannot jettison? A valid concern is that the yearning makes a mess of being-in-the-moment.  That same yearning can deny future possibilities when it turns to ruminating.  For some, nostalgia can magnify preoccupation.  Not good.

Kodachrome~Epson Scanner

Yet there are fragments of nostalgia that remain fade-free. Like writing/journaling and photography, riding a sport bike can be solitary, well, a choice by many, including myself. Certainly some of my own experience aboard two wheels can be marked as memorable [and mostly positive].

Kodachrome~Epson Scanner

As is fitting this time of year, nostalgia tends to swell, though more specifically with auld lang syne, those days of fond remembrance, of days spent from far-off times or even those more recent. It matters none because an experience that generates a fondness or even a light-hearted sense of joy is timeless. The decades can sometimes feel “like only yesterday.”

The distinction I’m trying to make is that auld lang syne speaks of a heart-felt time devoid of regret and rumination. Isn’t that what probes our memory at year’s end?  What have we forgotten? Whom have we forgotten?

My school of thought is that these fade-free capsules of nostalgia are not containers of events that could’ve or should’ve been. No, auld lang syne is more about preserving good things which matter: lessons learned, people who’ve made a difference, the unconditional, enduring quality of gratitude and love.

Before I make a mess of this post, I’ll let the poet Robert Burns weigh in. He’s the Scot who made this poem, this inimitable song, about as timeless as anything found in life. Click here.