Last update: January 16, 2017
Learning to miss someone or something is part of the personal growth process. The inability to bear the permanent emptiness of an absence can sometimes be destructive, so it is necessary to learn the art of saying goodbye, or "letting go" of what hurts and disappoints, but is still part of life.
We know that the concept of "nostalgia" is usually associated with the lack of a person. However, it is curious that the human being is a specialist in missing objects, situations, people and even abstract dimensions that are impossible to define.. We are talking about emotional and existential voids, of two inner worlds so complex as to endanger the mental health of each of us.
I miss the person I was before, when I was happier and had more hopes, more dreams. This idea, this feeling that we have all experienced at least once in our life is what psychologist Robert Plutchik defines as "desire of the past" and which is part of his theory of the wheel of emotions.
Let us not forget that living in this fragile bubble of desire raises hope for what we have had or have been in the past. Desire in turn leads to vulnerability, vulnerability to fear and sometimes even depression. Before allowing ourselves to drift like Shakespeare's Ophelia, immersed in a world of sadness, we must train ourselves in the art of saying goodbye and above all of feeling nostalgic.
That country called "nostalgia"
There is an invisible country. A parallel, imprecise, intangible world that we all visit sooner or later is called "nostalgia". We open the door to enter this world every time someone we love leaves us. We go back to it when we break a routine or activity that was previously meaningful to us. We even live almost permanently in this world when we lose someone or when we feel a deep dissatisfaction with what we are or do.
In this world there is a cold wind called yearning, which is the desire for someone or something. In fact, as the Latin root of the term reveals, "yearn" means "shortness of breath", in other words we find it hard to breathe because in our heart there is a void through which our life escapes little by little. Because the land of nostalgia is like a gloomy labyrinth where we must never stay for so long because the longer we stay, the faster we will forget the way back.
Living in this permanent exile plunges us into despair and deep dissatisfaction with the present, with the real world. Before we get anchored in this twilight of life, we should be able to make intelligent decisions in times of emotional distress in order to get out of this maze and understand that nostalgia is part of life, but not a way of life.
Train emotions in the art of farewell
We must learn to close the cycles. Not to desire what we were yesterday, but to invest in what we can be today. We must learn to miss those who are no longer close to us, leaving them in a precious little corner of our heart, while we make the decision to find happiness.. Life in the end is made up of decisions, of steps that, one after the other, take us out of our personal labyrinths where it is not good to stay too long.
Think about strategies that can help you in such situations.
Finding your way out in the midst of emotional complexity
Nostalgia takes us into three very powerful dimensions: desire, fear of loneliness and emotional vulnerability. They are three shrewd enemies that you need to know thoroughly to learn to control and tame them.
- Experiencing the confusion. With the longing and longing for something or someone, confusion comes right away. What do I do now? What will become of me? We experience an infinity of emotions and sensations. For a while, it is necessary to live them, accept them and vent them.
- Analyzing the emotional tangle. To deal with the pain caused by absence or the void left by pain itself, it is essential to analyze and delve into the emotional tangle in which we are trapped and which dominates us.
- Desire, for example, can be overcome with new goals in the present. The fear of loneliness, on the other hand, is extinguished with the courage of those who begin to enjoy their own company and who at the same time seek the support of others.
- Emotional vulnerability heals with the courage of those who look to tomorrow without fear. It does this by investing in resilience, in the strength that no one teaches us, but that we discover we have day after day. Sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of others, with the decision of those who want to be the protagonist of the story of their life.
We must be willing to take new directions in life, without the shadow of that lack, that absence or that emptiness questioning our decisions. The human being will always feel the lack of things or people, a legacy of an exceptional past. They are pages of our life that we cherish with great affection, but they are also the chapters of a past that precedes a novel that still has many, many pages to write.
