"All I know is that there is a charm in revisiting things. A charm so strong that I'll want to keep coming back. A charm that may be driven by my want to see how much I've changed, how my perspectives have shifted or who I was versus who I am." The blog covers topics like introspection, differentiated priorities over time, the notion of nostalgia, the cultural gaps and just how good it is to retrace your steps!
With a new phase in life, come new challenges to overcome and opportunities to learn from. I feel the need to appreciate what has gone by. Everything that we do or partake in makes up a part of our lives that we can't always define. This activity could be a nature trek or a watching a movie, experiencing a play, reading through your childhood favourites, etc., i.e., anything that you can experience and derive worth from.
Doing things again or repeating them may seem redundant since it's already been done - but that's just surface talk! The charm of repeating activities, steps and consumption patterns usually leads to you making several discoveries or details you may have overlooked. The re-exploration aspect enables us to see the very same pieces of content or life experiences in different lights than when we initially came across them.
From how you now feel about it as compared to the first watch to where you are in life at different times, everything makes a difference. When you speak to several people about the same series, you tend to get several perspectives on how the people saw it. What a revisit does is not just restate the plot points that occurred but also put more attention on the subtleties of characters, the intended foreshadowing, differences made by the application of music or even the different styles of direction used in the production of the piece.
Noticing things you may have overlooked is always fun and also makes for a steep learning curve. Even if you may have thought that doing something again is a bit rough around the edges, it does push one to be more introspective. From the band Coldplay's song "The Scientist" and its video, we see the intended main character's journey in reverse as the song thematically moves forward and how he would like to do some things again with the "Oh, let's go back to the start". The context itself may be slightly different from how it was intended to be perceived but the way I see it is that he doesn't want to redo things differently but just experience them once more. This goes to show that the joy and raw emotions he felt during those periods in life were so close to his very essence. So much so that, in his dying moments, all he wanted was to feel that way again.
The idea of revisiting the past has been explored a lot throughout different pop culture media. A notion of nostalgia has also been accredited to doing this. Nostalgic memories may differ from how the person felt during the time they experienced whatever it is that they did. This may change the experience of the activity itself. So much so, that your nostalgia-coated may push you to feel that a certain movie or experience was much better than it was! Nostalgia in itself loosely refers to having sentiments, usually positive, towards a period in the past. When doing anything again, a wall you may run into is having the ability to remove these nostalgia-tinted lenses to truly appreciate a piece of media and on the opposite end, you may wish to allow yourself to feel nostalgic to increase the sentiments you'd have towards something. For instance, if I was to watch Pokémon I'm sure that I'd think a lot of it is bloody fun even though I'm well aware it's mostly uninteresting content for the person I am now. At the same time, my nostalgia for the show as well as the time I mainly watched it over will make the activity of watching it much better than it would be otherwise!
I'm getting to see not only new sides of stories or objects but also I'm learning to see where I stand now as compared to when I saw things the last time. My main references when I say "things" have been tangible and intangible things like anime, movies, manga, books, series, pictures, social media posts, songs, past feelings and memories to name a few. All I know is that there is a charm in revisiting things. A charm so strong that I'll want to keep coming back. A charm that may be driven by my want to see how much I've changed, how my perspectives have shifted or who I was vs who I am. Maybe the charm lies in not figuring out what the charm exactly is.
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