This week I thought I’d wander over to Wales with my linguistic rambling. Hiraeth is another word that’s tied into the national identity of the people that speak it, and another one with no single word that can accurately express it in English. It’s a kind of homesickness, but shaded with longing and grief.
It’s a desire for the past, mixed with a sense that home does not quite feel like home anymore. It’s, in a way, what you feel when you leave your childhood home for the first time; the sense that even if you go back, it’ll never quite be the same.
We can’t change our past, and we can’t travel back to it; it’s ok to long for it, to remember it, but hiraeth can’t become living in the past; we must instead learn from it…and then let it go and move on from it.
