Girly Gains

Source : Yogatips

I focused my attention back on the dark abyss in front of me. My gaze began to muffle together, unable to make out what was in front of me. I rubbed my eyes hard until abstract shapes and colors clouded my vision. Through the mess, I could vaguely make out a figure in front of me. It seemed familiar, but I couldn’t begin to make out a face. I made a gun with my right hand and pointed at it. Steadily, I aimed at my target and fired, even making gun noises to along with it. I felt devilishly silly, but fired again and again. I shot the figure in front of me probably a hundred times. Waking up the next morning, I shot at the figure a hundred times more. It was only days later until I began to realize I had been shooting at myself.

“Nostalgia,” after all, combines the Greek word for homecoming (nostos) with the one for pain or ache or longing (algia). The longing to return home, homesickness-or at least that’s what it meant when it was first coined. As I lived with nostalgia, though, I came to understand that as much as anything else it was wrapped up in who I once imagined I could become, how I had once imagined myself in the future, as an adult, that is, right now, in the present. Nostalgia can become a fun house-mirror in this way, reflecting all the potential future selves that once sat in us, future selves that time aborted, dreams we allowed to fall into desuetude as we settled into the reality of our identity. In this way it has much to do with our full relationships to time as it does with any one place, with a literal “home.” This might be related to the idea that we feel more alive, more ourselves somehow, when we’re imagining what we could be than when we’re reflecting on what we are, because it’s in exercising this imaginative faculty that we get a taste of the eternal, whereas in reflection we’re confronted over and over with the radical bummer of our finitude.

Then we get the Earth, supposedly full of living organisms (some could argue vapid zombies), and we have comparatively the laziest ecosystem to exist. It’s just incredible to me how someone can admire something that serves no purpose. For the sake of explanation, consider yoga. It’s hyped out of proportion as people struggle to replicate advanced poses and positions to eventually reach some sort of, dare I say, transcendence. To what, I don’t fucking know, but you get the idea. It’s a lot of doing nothing and downward dogging around and I think we’re all just getting our hopes up too much to be sane.

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