Nostalgia: a kind of homesickness for the past.
Another way of putting it: the longing you will have in future for the places and people around you now.
But you don’t really want the people not to change. Even if it were possible for them not to change, you wouldn’t condemn them to stasis.
But they, the living, make the place what it is. By allowing that the people will change you must allow that place will change too.
The imagined choice of nostalgia – between “unchanged or changing” – is a false one: the alternatives are really “dead or alive”.
You choose life, of course, and so these people and places will all pass away.
Then – what is that you long for?
Nostalgia: homesickness for a holy immortality.
See Also:
You Can’t Stay
Old Buildings
Three kinds of change
Big Thief: Change; or, Ships of Theseus
Change (the hard kind)
Peter Drucker on continuity and change
Worse than this change
Stability: Burke and incremental change
The Hero’s Journey (Wherever I May Roam)
Lost Worlds
The Unforgiving Minute
Doing, Being and Becoming
Past / Prologue
Motion sickness: change and stability