I closed my eyes just slightly so that I could still see something. I laid my head down on my left shoulder, exactly in the least comfortable position, and looked out.

I see the snowy peaks of the Low Tatras in the distance. I get flashbacks of sitting here before. 20, 17, 15, …,8, 4, 1...

Unsure how many years ago and how many times I’ve been here, but I am looking for the same feeling. “The next stop is Vyšné Hágy”. Why do we feel the need to return to places? Why do we look for the known?

I think it’s time to send a postcard to myself to analyze how it makes me feel…

"Being here makes me think of my childhood. I long for those times. No matter how hard I long for these moments, they never come back. Things change. Why do we long for these moments? I bought a book called Retro Vysoké Tatry. It depicts the socialist High Tatras on postcards and short descriptions of the different settlements around. Lia would say, "tsundoku again" (One day I will explain what this means and link it here :)))

I tried to look around and couldn't stop thinking about how things changed. I feel that tourism looked differently before. Of course, it did. Maybe it's just an illusion as my family traveled differently or we didn't have much money to spend/waste. My mom would always pack some snacks for the hike and we would come to the mountain hut restaurant, sit at a table right below the sign: "Don't consume your own food here", and eat our rožok s paštétou. And when we finished our splendid luncheon, we packed and noticed the sign.

Nowadays, we eat in fancy restaurants in the mountains, we buy fancy sports clothes because we need to go hiking for 10 minutes. We need to feel luxurious. It's a status times more than anything."

Going back to my original thought, it’s quite funny that we tend to look for the things we know. We nostalgically look back at the times when we felt good and we repeatedly try to get back those times and feelings again. 

We watch the same movies and go to the same places. This brings us comfort and safety and helps us escape the stress of our daily lives. We come back “home to our cocoon”. Are we scared of the novelty or the disappointment that this novelty could carry? We cannot risk it, of course! 

As we idealize past events, our memories get skewed and we focus only on the positives, forgetting the negative part. We forget that things are not only black and white. I know that we will always look for some sort of emotional comfort, but we need to understand that things do change. Nostalgia feels nice sometimes, but it can also leave us disappointed if we expect to find similar feelings by repeating past experiences. Every moment is special and will never happen again, we all know that, but we forget to remember.