The Longing We Carry

There’s a kind of ache that lives just beneath the surface of our everyday lives. Not the sharp kind brought on by heartbreak or loss but something quieter, deeper.

A longing.

The Welsh call it hiraeth. It’s more than homesickness.

Hiraeth is a soul-deep yearning for a place, a time, or even a version of yourself that you may never have truly known. It’s the feeling you get when you drive through your old neighborhood, only to realize it’s not yours anymore.Or when you think of someone long gone, and the memory brings both comfort and sorrow.

Hiraeth is the ache for something lost or maybe never found. It’s the breath between nostalgia and grief; the space where absence becomes presence, even if only in our hearts—a yearning never satisfied.

Germans also have a word to describe this ache: sehnsucht.

It’s not exactly the same as hiraeth but it connects in a similar way with the soul. Whereas hiraeth looks back with yearning, sehnsucht looks forward with longing.

Humans yearn and long. We yearn for the past while longing for the future.

Sensucht is the ache of the ideal that has not yet been realized but is, no less, deeply felt. It’s the reason we cry when we hear a song that stirs something in us we didn’t know was sitting there waiting to touch our heart. It’s the unexpected realization of unspoken anticipation. It remains a longing yet unrealized.

As a man of faith, I know both.

There are days I feel hiraeth for Eden, imagining what it must have been like to experience the nearness we once had with God before the Fall. I sense a yearning for the innocence we lost and
for the unbroken world that we were created to inhabit.

On other days, sehnsucht rises up in me. My soul aches with a holy discontent, longing for the Kingdom to come, for the day when every tear will be wiped away and our weary Earth will finally be made new. Oh, what a beautiful day that will be!

In Romans 8, Paul writes that “all creation groans” not in despair, but in eager anticipation.

Perhaps that’s what these words are trying to describe: the groaning of our spirits for a world made whole.

Romans 1:19-23 ESV

¹⁹For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. ²⁰For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope ²¹that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. ²²For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. ²³And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

Other languages have similar words:

Saudade (Portuguese): Melancholy longing for someone or something that is absent.

Toska (Russian): A deep spiritual anguish, sometimes without a specific cause (described by Nabokov).

Dor (Romanian): A blend of longing, melancholy, and the ache of separation.

Maybe our longing isn’t a flaw but a compass. It’s not a a weakness to silence, but rather a signal that we were made for more. Our best life isn’t now. It’s still to come.

Maybe you have felt like a stranger in your own life while aching to find something without having words to adequately express it. In that case, I believe you’ve experienced what the Welsh call hiraeth, and what Germans call sehnsucht.