Did you know, the term 'nostalgia' derives from the Greek words nostos (return) and algos (pain)?
The literal meaning of nostalgia is the pain evoked by the desire to return to one's place of origin.
In years gone by it was used to describe the mental suffering soldiers experienced when they were away at war.
It’s weird how we use the term now in a more positive sense to describe the warm fuzzy feeling we get when we think about happy times in our past.
I had a bit of it on Friday night when Kev and I went to a silent 90’s disco on Bournemouth Pier with two good friends.
A silent disco is where you dance around with headphones on - usually there is a choice of music so you aren’t all listening to the same tune together, and it’s hilarious because when you take your headphones off, you’ll hear the songs being murdered by drunk people who have no idea how out of tune they are, but are loving every minute of singing at the top of their lungs!
Weirdly, it wasn’t the songs themselves that made me feel nostalgic about the 90’s because they were playing the very popular tunes of the day that I didn’t really listen to much at the time.
Tunes like “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, “The Thong Song”, “Man, I Feel Like a Woman”, to name but a few. They’ve gradually been absorbed into my psyche over the years, but I rarely listened to them at the time.
In the 90’s I spent my time in the car listening to cassettes of rave DJ sets that my friends had copied for me (I couldn’t even tell you who the artists were) and very un-90’s CD’s of Pink Floyd, Jimmy Hendrix, Bob Marley and Bob Dylan for the more mellow moments, recovering after big nights out.
The real sense of nostalgia that night came from being on Bournemouth Pier and looking out across the beach at night.
After my friends and I were turfed out of clubs in Bournemouth in the 90’s, steaming and sweaty from a night of completely ridiculous hardcore raving, we regularly went down to the beach to dunk ourselves (always fully clothed for me because we were already soaked in sweat) then we just sat on the sand listening to music until the sun came up.
The sights, sounds and smells have hardly changed, and I was whisked back to how I felt at that time, and I felt a real sense of gratitude for all the happy times I’d had with them.
I’m hardly in touch with any of the friends I made at that time, and a couple of them are no longer with us, but they still figure large in my bank of happy memories.
I don’t have any urge to relive my past - those days can never be recreated even with a reunion because everyone will have changed, but it really makes me smile when I think of all the things we used to consider “problems” such as avoiding one of our mate’s exes in a club, or pooling together our left-over cash to put petrol in someone's car to get home.
It’s the very ordinary things that tend to evoke a sense of nostalgia, and although you might feel there is nothing particularly special about what you’re doing right now, one day you’ll look back with fondness about certain things - even the things you thought were a pain in the arse at the time - because they are the fabric of your life.
They are “home”, and they’re special.
However, nothing about the past can be changed, so you might as well spend more of your time looking towards the future!
Our 90 Day Breakthrough kicks off next month.
If you want to get stuck into making some new memories to feel nostalgic about, then please hit me up for more details. If you sign up in the next few days, you’ll be invited to join us at a live event on 26th September at Rhinefield House in the New Forest.
I’m already feeling nostalgic about the past events we’ve held there, and can’t wait to meet our gang again!