In 2020, I thought a lot about emotions from other cultures that resonate now

Published on 21 December 2020

This year has probably been the strangest of my life. I honestly couldn’t have imagined a time like this, with all its fear and heartache, enforced isolation and not knowing what might happen next. It’s like waking up in an episode of Black Mirror.

The surreal nature of the whole experience has made it hard to properly understand and process my emotions during this time. There’s been sadness and fear, optimism and resignation, guilt, pleasure and boredom in shifting conurbations that I’ve frequently found hard to vocalise.

Then a few months ago I read ‘The book of Human emotions’* – a book about emotional concepts in other languages. It was a revelation. The book described how the different experiences and values of people from other countries – things like colonial trauma or a deep affinity to the land – spawned emotions in their languages for which we have no words in English.

As I pawed through the pages I found a new lexicon to help me make sense of how I was feeling. Here I’ve chosen four emotions – coined in another time and place – that have perfectly articulated my heart’s temperature in 2020.

Dolce far niente

The beginning of lockdown was difficult for obvious reasons. Like many of us, I hadn’t appreciated the seriousness of the situation until the key finally turned in the lock and life settled into an altogether more sedate affair.

Yet as the number of cases fell and the risks subsided I found I could begin to take pleasure in my temporary confinement.

Here was a welcome excuse to be slovenly and slow. I fell asleep at 9 and woke at dawn, baked pistachio cake in my slippers, tackled the much-neglected DIY and allowed everything to take twice as long as it should. I went for 3 hour walks in the light spring sunshine without a whisper of FOMO.

I procrastinated, dithered and pootled, stopping mid-job for a biscuit, a stretch or a daydream. It was life in the slow lane and it taught me a lesson long known to sages the world over but until now absent from my frenetic existence.

Dolce far niente (Italian): the pleasure of doing nothing

Ilinx

By late-summer it was clear lockdowns were here to stay. I met a friend for dinner just as this knowledge was beginning to sink into the collective conscious and seed melancholia across the nation.

We ordered our food and drink and started catching up. Then as I went to pick up my wine I was ambushed by a strange sensation, an urge to throw the glass on the floor. I wanted to feel the shock of the glass splintering against the tiles, to watch the wine stain my legs in a Pollockian spatter. I quietly put the glass down, rattled.

It was a feeling for which I have no precedent. I wasn’t angry. This sudden mood for violence wasn’t borne of temper or ill will. It was more a bored frustration, a desire to upend the monotony of the preceding months by doing something pointlessly destructive but, I suspect, also oddly gratifying. A small tear in the fabric of my humdrum existence.

llinx (Greek): a sudden urge to cause wanton destruction

Han

As the pandemic continued I settled into the ‘new normal’. I established a rhythm for restricted periods, relying on weekly zoom calls, exercise and the constant sharing of Trump memes.

I got used to working online and saying goodbye to people by making hug shapes with my arms in the sky. I dodged strangers on pavements, kept masks in my pockets and stopped rifling around in fruit boxes for the sweetest specimens. I let my niece brush my hair even though I knew she’d kiss the back of my head.

I found happiness in places but it was always fleeting and foreshadowed by the knowledge that things could be better. It was an odd kind of half happiness, a place where you could briefly find distraction or relief before reality bubbled up to the surface again reminding you that nothing was ‘normal’ about this new.

Han (Korean): a collective acceptance of suffering combined with a quiet yearning for things to be different

Vorfreude

Christmas day is now only four sleeps away and it’s looking to be a quiet affair. There are still pleasures to be had of course – dressing the tree in its cheering outfit of lights and baubles, eating a hot mince pie straight from the oven with a blob of brandy-laced cream. But it will invariably have a hint of Scrooge about the gills.

Instead of dwelling on this year’s shortcomings, I’m looking to future riches. With two vaccines in the offing, I can begin to contemplate dinner parties with friends, a soaking in the warm Caribbean sea, returning my niece’s stealthy kisses – pleasures that will be all the sweeter after months of sadness and forbearance.

I may be hunkering down for now but the prospect of happier days burn bright in my horizons, urging me onwards like the North Star.

Vorfreude (German): Intense, joyful anticipation derived from imagining future pleasures.

*The book of human emotions, Tiffany Watt Smith