Hiraeth – Welsh; a longing for a place you’ve never been,
nostalgia for a place you can’t go back to.
It’s March. Here in the northern hemisphere, in the
temperate zone where I live, March is generally a crappy, moody month. Not
quite winter, not quite spring, it can’t make up its mind who it is or what it
wants. And all of us who live here just want it to be over. So done with
winter. So ready for change, for spring, for something not this. We are longing
for something to shift, to get to another place, for it to be warm, easy, to
feel the sun on our face and not have our feet freezing at the same time.
How much is this a metaphor for our journey post infidelity?
For me, timing wise, it is the exact same journey, both close up and zoomed
out. Starting with January 1. Just survive these cold bleak months. We bless
February for being so short. But March, well, it marches. We want to jump straight
to warm May breezes but still March marches. And, I recognize, so should I. It’s
the only month that comes with instructions. March: keep marching. Keep putting
one foot in front of the other. You will, eventually, get somewhere else. Just
keep going.
When you are recovering from infidelity, March is the
middle, the long stretch of “meh” that you can’t skip. The only way out of March
is through. The only way out of the middle is through. But while you are there,
it seems so long. It leaves you kind of restless. Will I always feel this way?
Why do I feel so numb sometimes? What is it that I am missing? Why, when I
think about moving forward does my mind take me back to what is lost? Which
brings us back to the middle. March on.
Long ago my mother taught me the Welsh word hiraeth, which
she told me means a longing, a nostalgia for places you’ve never been. It’s a
deep soul feeling, and I recognized it in the pull I felt to Scotland, a place
I miss, though I have never been. More recently, it came up in my meditation
practice, where it was framed a little differently. It was defined as a place
you can’t go back to. As those words hit my ears, tears came to my eyes. I recognized
in the deep restlessness of March that I am feeling right now is the vague
but persistent discomfort that something is missing, that some old feeling, I
can’t quite call up, should be here.
Hiraeth, for me, right now, is about grieving the past. The
past is both a place that never existed (at least to my post-infidelity self,
what I thought was true and real, perhaps wasn’t) and a place I can’t go back
to. And today, I am allowing myself to grieve this.
Perhaps that’s what the long slow March is for; to take the
time to grieve what is being left behind, so we can let it go, make space for the
present and for what is to come. “Life is an exercise of constant change… Open
to the present as best you can and step forward.” – Tamara Levitt
