you know how right now, at this moment, there is this way that you feel that is unique to this time in your life?

it’s weird, because it is beyond thought. it is the zeitgeist of your emotions.

that zeitgeist is the product of more factors than i could ever articulate. it is the gestalt of a million little things that have led to this exact moment, the trends in your life both large and small, consequential and trivial.

i have always been fascinated by this. because it can’t described, it can only be lived. you can’t just say “oh here is the entire landscape of my being” and recreate the felt experience of your consciousness at that moment in your life.

it is something that is unique to you, something that no one else will ever experience. and even more poignantly, it is unique to this moment in time. your life will always be shifting, and you will never be able to recreate that exact crystallization of your experience again.

and what’s crazy is that we don’t even notice it!

it’s almost like how you stop smelling a candle after you have been in the room with it for a while. and it isn’t until long after you’ve left and encounter a grove of pine trees that you are momentarily brought back to those first few minutes when you were still keenly aware of that candle’s pine scent wafting through the room.

sensory nostalgia is how we are able to look back on the permutations of our being and appreciate exactly how life used to feel like at some point in the past. it allows you to relive it in a way that abstract reflection can never engender.

whether it’s through music or scents, different portraits of your being are encoded with novel sensory information in your memory. and re-experiencing those sensory stimuli can bring you right back to the actual feeling of what your life was like when you first or most powerfully encountered them.

a bottle of hair putty brings me back to being 21 and experiencing the beautiful excitement of all kinds of new adventures. a song reminds me of what it was like processing the biggest leap of faith i’d ever taken when i left private school and had my grandma’s house to myself for 2 weeks before starting public school for the first time in my life.

just like the way pine trees bring you back to that candle.

i had never thought of nostalgia being like sensory adaptation, but it was like this huge revelation for me. i’ve been trying to put this sensation into words for half my life now. and for the first time in years, i’ve come up with a meaningful new way to describe it.