This Is Why You Shouldn’t Rekindle An Old Flame

More often than I would like people have said to me “you’re too sensitive.” Initially I took this as a bad thing. A bad trait to have. It was something I should change about myself in order to take a joke or fit the norm. However, over the past few days of researching about sensitivity I have come to the conclusion that the positives about being sensitive outweigh the negatives.

Being sensitive means that you feel things more deeply than others. You have a better understanding and better intuition when it comes to certain things—things that your peers around you would not be able to sense. The feelings are more intense; your embarrassment feels hotter and much worse and your happiness is felt like the drug ecstasy. You can empathize better than anybody else.

Being a highly sensitive person means living life to its magnitude. To undergo the real human experience is a blessing, because after this human experience nothing is certain. The spiritual experience could be much different. There could be only one class of feeling—serenity, ease, quietness. Although this may be an appealing idea, it ultimately does not teach the quintessence of life. It does not teach to love, to appreciate, to understand, to be resilient.

Memories and nostalgia come fixed in with being highly sensitive. Moments of the past seem better than the now, only because we make it seem that way. We are not satisfied with the present, so we look to the past for answers. We look to the past to understand why we are not satisfied in the now. However, nostalgia is a dirty liar. We reflect back on moments when we were happiest, even if at the time it wasn’t realized, and compare it to the present. Anything compared to the past makes the present seem futile. The danger of nostalgia is this: we focus on the light at the back of the tunnel instead of fixing our minds onto the trekking of the tunnel to the other end. The other end holds much more power and light than the light that shines from the back of the tunnel.

You are onto better things. That’s what this trekking is for. But sometimes through the tunnel there are moments of feeling lost, confused, and alone. To cope with these moments we look towards the light at the back of the tunnel. We want to go back to the alluring light, because we think we know for certain that it’s guaranteed happiness. There is no unpredictability of the past. No mystery, no tricks, just a better time. And when we think of a better time, we think of the ones we loved most and how they loved us back. We think of the time with them before they inevitably left for their own trekking.

Your mind shuffles through moments that stood out. You see the first time that person cried. You see your hands on the steering wheel, and that person in the passenger seat tells you a secret. You think of how at ease you felt simply being in their presence. On late nights when you’re daydreaming of rolling on your side and seeing their face with light shining through the windows you can’t help but feel so comfortable, and also never more wistful your whole life.

There was a connection, and when the soul feels it there is a light in the mind that scintillates. But it becomes faint when they leave, until eventually you think it’ll never burn as brightly as it did and you’re afraid to ever let that light shine again—that star to burn again—because watching it die was so painful.

So don’t watch it die again. Rekindling of an old love is self destruction. Do not go back to the light at the back of the tunnel. Continue forward in your journey, because the moments of the past are sweetened by subjectivity. This person who loved you for a time is not the same person anymore and neither are you. Carry the love you learned from the past into the future, and in time the light inside your mind will flicker ever so slightly, and then burst into solar flares.