Weekly Photo Challenge: Nostalgia

I believe nostalgia has to do with memories that evoke warm feelings. For me, the trigger for nostalgia lies in many things that are simple and familiar – a song, a picture, a season, a smell, an type of encounter, a type of situation, etc..  In my opinion nostalgia can sometimes be  misleading and not a true representation of the past, and can perhaps even be dangerous if one wallows in it too much. You may start yearning for a past that can never be duplicated.  Nostalgia also ignores  the negative things that happened in your past.  Perhaps it is a good thing for your sanity, but if those negative experiences still remain unresolved, particularly in the sense of its impact on people around you, you end up with a false sense of reality.

Anyway, I went looking for pictures that could capture the sense of nostalgia for me.  It was a dangerous quest, and I got my head buried in old photo albums, a process that would have never ended had I allowed myself to succumb to my overwhelming feelings of nostalgia that the pictures evoked.  It was difficult. So I resolved to quickly pick a small and random number of pictures from the many that I encountered.  Since nostalgia is a personal thing, I am not sure if any of this will resonate with others who have not been a part of my experiences.  Suffice to say, that I have a lot of things that I feel nostalgic about, and that I consider myself quite fortunate in this regard.

The following picture is from my youth.  My remember my uncle, a great man, very well.  My siblings and I lived a very nice life on a beautiful college campus. We had a lot of friends and were sheltered in so many different ways.  I still remember the weekend movies at the Open Air Theater on campus. It was a great place to be!
I used to play field hockey with my friends in school.  This is a picture of the school team. We used to compete with other Central Schools.

I do not have pictures from life as an undergraduate student.  When I went to graduate school in the US, I lived at a place we called “The Establishment”.  I made some new friends.

Life changed after I graduated and started working.  We got married and had kids.  Those days are also now part the memories.

The following pictures are from a family road-trip that we made about ten  years ago.

And this is from another occasion the same year.  I still had black hair at that time.

These pictures bring back good memories and fill me with nostalgia.  The kids are all grown up these days and are off doing their own stuff.  Let the good times continue to roll!