Returning Home: Nostalgic Thoughts While Playing Golf

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Returning home induces a strange feeling, nostalgia, pathos.

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I returned to my hometown, the place where I grew up, where I spent my formative years. I visited my old home, the one that I spent 13 years in, I visited my old school, and most importantly, I played some golf on the course where I first learned how to play this sport.

The girlfriend and I needed some alone time so we went down south in the province. We stayed at an incredible place, in a small town close to one of the main rivers in South Africa.

As soon as I got to the course, my heart made strange movements. It is a bittersweet moment to think back on how things were, and how they are now. We always think of our modern selves in the past, taking our current thoughts to the past. And this is not always good. Because as we take our current selves and place them into the past we take more of ourselves than what there was. We think with our current mind frame as if this could be translated into the past, seamlessly.

In any case, please join me in this nostalgic return to the past with me, as I play some golf and think about the past, our history, our future, and what has yet to come.

The past has a strange hold on the future. We think about the past as something that happened, that cannot be changed, and which is devoid of the present. But the present and the future are wholly dependant on the past. The past actively shapes the present and the future. It so to speak extends its claws from the past to the future, to the present. We stand on the shoulders of giants, they say, but the more appropriate way of stating this idea is that the past always shapes the course of the present.

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As I walked the same path as I walked for many years, growing up on the course and learning to play golf, I was again struck by this strange idea. Without having the foundational groundwork that was laid there and then, I would not have been who I am today. The past so to speak grabs the present, dictating its unfolding.

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Even though the past sways the future, the future also changes the past in some sense. While driving and walking where I walked and drove 15 years ago, it felt like I never left. Everything still felt the same, and driving down the road I could not stop myself from thinking that I somehow never left. Everything felt the same, and my "present" felt like a fever dream, something I made up. The present seemed to drift away and the past was all that remained.

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And isn't the past always just a fever dream? When we think about the past, it seems like a world away when we think back. There is nothing there, the past is long gone, a world away, something so distant from us, yet it is there, we lived through and in it. But when we think back, it remains a fever dream.

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It felt like I never left. And I cannot get away from that idea, that feeling. How is it that something that went away 15 years ago can still feel so similar? I drove to my old home without even looking at the map. I knew how to get there, almost like I never left.

But this dream seems like something that will never end. But has it even started yet? That is another issue.

I played the course like I always did, it felt the same. It brought back so many memories that I repressed. I do not like to think back, as the past is a strange can of worms that I do not like to open.

I hope that you enjoyed these photographs of my journey through my memories. These photographs were kindly taken by @urban.scout with my camera. She enjoyed being behind the lense a bit, and she wanted me to share these photographs and these memories.

I hope that you will also think back to the past, even if only for a short while.

All of the photographs are my own, taken with my Nikon D300, taken by @urban.scout. The musings are also my own, albeit inspired by my past, my present, and my future.