As a writer, it’s probably no surprise that I love language.
But, I can’t help but feel that English often falls short in terms of accurate reflections of emotions and experiences. The mindfulness teacher in me is passionate about emotional literacy and I notice that non-English languages have more capacity for the breadth of human feeling than my native tongue.
I wonder if this is why we don’t always get it right? I once had someone say I seemed ‘unhappy’ and I was taken aback because, in fact, I felt I was better described as ‘introspective’ or ‘calm and content’ at that time, a bit like a boat on a placid lake in the quiet and still hours of the morning. (I’ve done a few early morning fishing excursions in my time and there’s a real sense of quiet happiness in that). English speakers often assume that ‘happiness’ means you should be grinning from ear to ear and bouncing off the walls. That’s simply not true. To others, ‘peaceful’, may appear the same as ‘listless’, ‘introspective’ or ‘unhappy’, but that is not necessarily the case.
The words ‘anger’ and ‘love’ for example, cannot always convey what we may really feel. Sometimes we English speakers adapt the sentence to try to pigeonhole the word ‘love’ into what we want it to mean: for example, ‘you love someone’ or ‘you are in love with someone’. Clearly there is much variety in the definition of the word, ‘love’.
Being able to have the right language to accurately describe our feelings or capture our experience is not just ‘fluffy' stuff. Interrogating our emotional landscape is good for us. Mindfulness teaches us to become curious observers and accurate noters (labelling our feelings) of our varied emotional landscape. Doing so can help us to pinpoint our emotional needs and recognise patterns in our feelings and triggers or traumas that need healing. Having a broad dictionary of emotions is described as ‘emotional granularity’ and studies show that people with a richer emotional vocabulary are better able to cope with stress and children that can describe their feelings do better at school.
Outside of the English categories of emotions and descriptions, there is a whole wonderful, expansive world of language that truly do our rainbow of emotions justice. And not just emotions, but words to describe unique experiences too.
The Germans have some great words. Fernweh: the 'call of faraway places,' homesickness for the unknown. and Sehnsucht, which depicts a deep yearning for an alternative life.
Dadirri is Aboriginal for a deep, spiritual act of reflective and respectful listening.
Kintsugi (Japanese): 'golden joinery' (the art of repairing broken pottery using gold), metaphorically meaning to render our flaws and fault-lines beautiful and strong.
Orenda (Huron): the power of the human will to change the world in the face of powerful forces such as fate.
Uitwaaien (Dutch): the revitalising feeling of going for a walk in the wind.
And last, but definitely not least: Mbuki-mvuki (Bantu): to desire to shed one’s clothes and dance uninhibited.
AMAZING.
Of course, we can describe all these things, but in English we don’t actually have explicit words for them.
As a New Zealand citizen and UK born but now assimilated Kiwi, I also have an appreciation for Māori language expressions and was reminded of this recently.
A few days ago a Marae-based Kohanga (child care) purchased a couple of my books to help teach the children mindfulness techniques to help them cope with their big feelings.
The centre manager emailed me asking for a receipt and I realised I hadn’t yet figured out how to make Shopify spit one out. *Facepalm* I jumped onto Google and then Shopify tutorials, but I could not figure out how to print off a receipt. So, it was far from ideal, but I had to screenshot the purchase in the order section of my site to send to my customer.
Out of respect for her language, I wanted to respond using a little Māori. 'Aroha mai’ I wrote, which expresses ‘I’m sorry’. To be clear, it’s not the ‘I’m sorry’ you use if someone has had something bad happen to them, but the ‘I’m sorry’ you use if you’ve done something wrong. It essentially translates to: ‘have compassion for me’.
Her reply was beautiful: Aroha mai, aroha atu.
It turns out that this is an old Māori proverb: "Love received, love returned”.
What a way to respond to an apology: ‘I see your apology, I have compassion for you and am returning love.’ Way cooler than ‘apology accepted’.
I loved this phrase so much that I turned it into a poster (the image at the top of this article) because I’d like to stick this on the wall of my office to remember this saying. And given my love for words, I can see myself building a collection of posters for all my favourite descriptives in other languages.
If you are as fascinated by language as me, you might enjoy the work of Dr Tim Lomas and his Happy Words Project.