Often nostalgia is connected to missing someone or something. It is a powerful memory because we absorbed the emotion of the event at the time it happened, and it affected us deeply. We carry the feelings of the emotion with us and each time we look back we find those feelings.

Nostalgic feelings help us understand ourselves because life is best understood looking backwards. We re-invent ourselves when we re-look at our past and the events that happened and it is those events that evoke strong feelings that we find first and become our life plot points when we look back.

Each time I think back over my life story, I rethink what happened and draw new conclusions. “How you arrange the plot points of your life into narrative shapes who you are and is a fundamental part of being human.” This is the subtitle in an interesting article titled Life’s Stories, published in The Atlantic in 2015. In that article, Monisha Pasupathi, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Utah, offered much insight on this subject. She stated: “In order to have relationships, we’ve all had to tell little pieces of our story.”

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” Soren Kierkegaard