Yesterday I was reviewing my resume, getting it ready to send to my current employer (who needs to keep current resumes on file). Like most people, I've heard you should keep your resume up-to-date, but generally never follow-through on the advice. Going through it, I thought about the previous positions I had throughout the years, and the various projects I was on. I realized that there were some pretty cool things I did with the help of my teammates. Stranger still, I realized that thinking about what happened in the past gave me some energy, and a realization that I could create again. I had suppressed a lot of that creative energy. I thought back to things we were tasked with back then. There was the crazy web-based graphical application which showed what rooms needed maintenance (graphically) in an age without such conveniences as Flash or working Java applets. There was the Visual Basic application that was doomed to failure before I took it upon myself to port it into a Perl / CGI application. There were the crazy little reporting projects written in Perl for a help desk reporting system. All of these things were hanging out in my mind, but for whatever reason I left them in long-term storage, suppressed and unavailable to me. That creativity was starved, and languished. Maybe it was the feelings that I couldn't change where I am that tucked those feelings away, or maybe I was keeping past successes under wraps and concentrating on the present. Whatever it was, it was healing to think about at least some areas where I felt I had made a difference, if only for a moment.

Maybe we need a little nostalgia to keep the fires going. Have you ever felt that just a little thought about the past brought out some creativity in the present? Share your thoughts in the comments.