As it turns out, there’s a word for it, that feeling of nostalgia, a sense that perhaps, something has passed you by and you’ll never ever really get it back. Maybe it was never really there at all.
Or perhaps a moment, and maybe you’re not even really sure what it was, but it makes you long for something that’s out in front of you, but you can’t really grab it, not at this moment in your life.
We’ve all felt it, but I’ve never been able to put a name to it until now. It turns out there is a word for it. It’s just not English.
Hiraeth. Pronounced with a soft “i”, a roll of the “r” and a twist of the “th” that would make any American struggle to enunciate. Listen to it here.
Hiraeth. A Welsh word without any direct English translation, so foreign that my autocorrect wants to replace it with “hire the” because even it knows there can’t really be a word for that feeling, can there be?
Hiraeth. What Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes as a “homesickness for a home you cannot return to, or that never was,” or what the University of Wales, Lampeter, defines as a “homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over the lost or departed.” (Thank you Wikipedia.)
If you’re Welsh, it’s a desire for the “Wales of past,” and by this I suspect a time well before unification and the now-current idea that a British identity is better than being Welsh. But I don’t know enough about that to be sure.
For me, some mornings, just the scent of wood burning in the distance as I walk to the car drops me into rough, rocky road deep in the heart of Nepal. Or I catch the smell of fresh cedar, and for a moment, I can recall the tall trees and majestic landscapes that make the Pacific Northwest a land like no other.
There are even times when I see one of my children playing, and in a flash, I’m transported to my own boyhood, playing a similar game in the cul-de-sac of the neighborhood where I grew up, not just lived.
These aren’t necessarily bad moments. I’m so glad to have the memories and the life experiences that take me back to so many wonderful places and times. And in many ways, I’m no longer pining for a way to get back to something that Christ has deemed past.
Yes, I would again consider a move to Nepal, if He asked. But I’d just as soon move anywhere that He asked, regardless of the cost. And that feels good. To know that my sense of hiraeth can bring a smile now (at least most days) instead of sadness.
What Christ continues to remind me of is that my hiraeth isn’t for any place or time on this planet at all, but that what I long for is my eventual reunification with Him, free from the shackles of this world and its imperfections and sin. That I’m simply passing through and will again be with Him, where it all started, some day in the future, whenever that might be.
Somedays, I want it sooner than later. If you truly love Christ, then you know what I mean. Other days, I pray that His return is a long time in the future, with the chance to talk to just one more unbeliever about His grace.
Whenever, I pray that I’m ready. That the sense of hiraeth I feel will come to a close, and there I’ll be, standing next to my Lord, and all the hiraeths of this world will no longer matter.