The Universal Emotion of Nostalgia
Unless you happen to be a white, heterosexual, male, America never has been great.
So much for the extreme-right rallying cry.
I’ve never been one to look back. I’ve always been driven by what lies ahead, what’s over the next hill or around the next curve. Maybe that’s what drove me as a kid.
While most of my high school classmates remained in Appalachia, I joined the Navy and sailed the seven seas where I jumped into the ocean from the flight deck of an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Aden, cut off a goat’s balls as part of a mating ritual in Indonesia, raced a NASCAR around the oval in Charlotte, created a small coin purse out of live Tarantulas in Australia’s outback, spent six-weeks with the Sinaloa cartel along the U.S./Mexican border and sailed a 16th century schooner through the sound and into the open ocean.
The ingrained sense of wanderlust compelled me to take a bicycle across America twice and cross the country by foot once. I married my Argentine wife after we knew each other a week, and moved to Buenos Aires a month later.
That was more than ten years ago and I’ve never looked back.
What does the word nostalgia come from and what does it mean?
The word nostalgia comes from two Greek words, nostos meaning “to return home” and algos meaning “pain”.
The term was coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in the 17th century to describe the anxieties displayed by Swiss mercenaries fighting away from home.
Nostalgia was considered a potentially debilitating and sometimes fatal medical condition expressing extreme homesickness. The modern view is that nostalgia is an independent, and even positive, emotion that many people experience often.
Nowadays, nostalgia is defined as a sentimentality for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. It is an emotional state characterized by a wistful affection for the past. Nostalgia can manifest in a variety of ways, but unlike emotions like happiness, which have a spectrum of English words to describe them, nostalgia has only one.
Jerry Nelson is an American writer living the expat life in Argentina and winner of the Revi 2021 Reader Award. You can find him at any of hundreds of sidewalk cafes and hire him through Fiverr, join the quarter-million who follow him on Twitter or contact him at jandrewnelson2@gmail.com
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