THESES:

  

1

2

 2. Nostalgia differs essentially from memory or recollection. It is the intense experience of longing for trusted safety, beauty and wellbeing. This is what makes nostalgia painful. But if you are aware of your own nostalgia and stay in touch with it, it will bring you balance and harmony with yourself.
1. Nostalgia is a feeling originating from the first authentic observations a human, a child, makes, perhaps at the first disengagement or abandonment. It colours the experience and serves as a sound-board which the individual human being uses to test and judge his perceptions, for which he longs and searches.
 		  

3

 3. Nostalgia has many faces. Nostalgia is not only pain but also wealth. A useful compass and anchor point. A centre from which one tests and gages one’s doings and longings. Nostalgia brings you back to yourself.
  		 
4. Nostalgia is necessary to take root in whatever place. It is the most authentic and essential expression of identity one can experience. Nostalgia is like a blueprint that determines your preferences, passions and directs and colours your viewpoint.
 

4

 
  5. Nostalgia is the longing to be in touch with the authentic, the feeling of one’s uniqueness, in order to take this with you to the future (comparable to a sort of chain stitch). As such nostalgia is explicitly connected to progress and development and acts as a hinge-point between past and future. It is much more than just a returning to.

5

6

7
6. Nostalgia is a universal emotion and therefore belongs to everyone; migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, strangers, displaced people, children, elderly, homeless people often do not have anything left than their nostalgia. Sometimes it is the last experience of harmony and safety. Migrants have to survive in a new environment, in a new country. Only nostalgia connects them with their homes, their identity, with whom they are themselves.

8

 7. He who is conscious of his nostalgia, can also recognise the nostalgia of the other, the stranger, and therefore the other is no longer experienced as that strange and different anymore.
8. Nostalgia is like the smell of warm sand, dry thyme or freshly mown grass, a stroke of light behind a curtain, the sound of frogs in the rain.