I dream about traveling the world.
Well, who doesn’t! Who doesn’t love the adventure and serendipitous discovery
that travel provides? However, I’d like to think my yearning is much more and it
stems from something deeper, and is inexplicable, even to me. So you can imagine
my delight when I came across a slew of words that came close to describing
this inner hankering.
Sehnsucht. It means the
inconsolable longing in the human heart for we know not what, a yearning for a
far, familiar unearthly land one can identify as one’s home. While I do consider
Pune and India my home, deep down, I always feel I am still looking for a place
where I truly belong … see, I told you it is difficult to explain this crazy dichotomy of restlessness and yearning for stillness! (There's a word for this affliction too—Alexithymia, which means the inability to express emotions in a verbal manner!)
Then there are Saudade and Hiraeth,
which are related words that explain the nostalgia associated with the
yearning.
