Nostalgia: A Coping Mechanism for Change

Let your imagine take you to a place forty years from now.  You look in the mirror and see the person that you are and always have been, though your reflection may have changed a bit.  You are facing a time in your existence where life has become confusing, the times have changed, and your not exactly fitting in with where the world seems to be going.  You may have a sense of confusion, loneliness, or even fear.  The only way to feel like yourself again is to think back to a time when you were 'in your prime' so to speak.  You think back to a time in your life where you felt as though you were on top of the world and would give anything to be back in that place if only for a moment. I believe that this is the kind of place that Ono is in.  With the life he led pre-war being the life he knew and loved, then having it all change so suddenly, it must be challenging for Ono.  Now he is torn between the life he had and the life has yet to lead. 

It seems as though the changes in Japan post-war are not changes that Ono is adapting to easily.  It seems as though nostalgia may become a coping mechanism for Ono or may be a coping mechanism or for anyone experiencing these types of feelings.  Nostalgia may take one back to a place when life made sense to them.  Though there were probably bad times too, it seems as though the good times always prevail. 

At the age of 22, I think that I already have a sense of what nostalgia feels like.  Especially around the holidays, I find myself telling stories of "the good old days."  I find myself looking back at the holidays spent with the whole family together, before my parents divorced.  My brother and I remeniss about how he was always the first to awake on Christmas morning and how he would run in and wake me up and we would sprint to the living room to see how many presents santa brought before even waking our parents.  I think back on how much I loved to be with my mom and my dad under one roof rather than doing Christmas eve at dads and Christmas day at moms.  I also love watching home videos of my whole family together, remembering a time where everything just made a little bit more sense.

I do not think that nostalgia is a bad thing.  I think that it is comforting and up-lifting for one to  fondly remember the past.  However, I do think that nostalgia can be dangerous if one were to dwell on the way things were and to not ever accept the way things are now.  Adapting to changes in life is something we all have to face and embrace in order to survive and grow as a person.  Becoming content with the changes may be a long, hard road but we are all capable, as humans, of doing so.  I think that though Ono struggles with the post war changes in Japan, after a while he will too adapt and eventually will become content with his place in the world again.  

I think that nostalgia may be a way to get through the hard times in life.  Nostalgia is a mechanism we use in getting through the in-between phases of life when moving from one chapter of life to the next.  I am sure that almost 100% of peoples lives are colored by nostalgia just because it is in our nature as humans to remember the good and to forget the bad.