All languages have their shortcomings. Sometimes words in our native tongue fail us. For me that seems to happen in English when it comes to emotions. There are feelings we all have but are hard to describe. Today I turn to German for a feeling I once described as melancholia but knew that didn’t quite capture the nuisances of the feeling now I have a word that does and I shall, in great English tradition, borrow it from German. It’s…
senhsuct – noun German- the inconsolable longing for we know not what; yearning for something currently unknown and undefined.
A friend once called it divine restlessness that precedes a change. Which is the best English description of it I’ve heard. It’s that desire to find the unknown, the undefined one so longs for that brings about the change. I think. I think senhsuct pushes us to know it, define it, and change to achieve so that we are consoled.
Mary Louise Eklund 
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