reliving

The difference between reliving and reminiscing... not a comparison I’ve much thought of before, but the subtle differences between the two have recently been brought to my attention. I’m not sure I necessarily agree that reliving implies the desire to do something again in real life (I suspect in this case the latter led to the former), but the mention of this distinction made me ponder.
They sound similar, both evocative of delving into and sifting through memories. But whilst reminiscing is the recollecting or re-telling of past experiences, reliving implies more emotion, more contact with the memories; it is experiencing the situation again, even if only in the imagination, and with this comes a far more powerful experience. If the memory behaves and retains enough of the bones of a happening, you can immerse yourself in a past experience, reliving it again and again, often with different details each time, or a veneer of idealism over the top. Reliving can be as much about the parts we don’t care to dredge up from the memory as those we adored and focus on. This is the other side of a rose-tinted reliving of the past; the unbidden and unwanted flashbacks to times of trauma or unhappiness... such reliving can be disturbing to the point of illness.
With any such foray into the times gone by may come nostalgia, a more bittersweet yearning for the past - people, places and phases. We tend now to use ‘nostalgia’ fondly, but it’s not hard to see why it was once considered a medical condition; an excessive tie to the past, whether a longing for happy times or an inability to overcome past pains, can be debilitating.
The kind of reliving I’ve been doing of late, though, has been a delicious indulgence. Rose-tinted yes, but a tad bittersweet too. Maybe it does indeed mean I want to do it all again... the question is, would I have learnt anything from the first time around?