Saudade, a deep emotional state

Saudade is feeling that emptiness produced by distance from the loved one, that flame that burns inside us and that will never be extinguished. The deep wind that revives the memory of our land or the melancholy that comes from knowing that something or someone may not return to us.

Saudade is the presence of absence. The longing for something or someone that we remember fondly, but know will be difficult to experience again. A deep emotional state that mixes sadness with affection to leave us with the bittersweet taste of what will never come, even if we maintain hope.

Saudade, the greatness of languages

The advantage of the existence of different languages ​​offers us the possibility of defining in a single word a mixture of sensations and emotions that does not exist in other languages. And that’s what happens with saudade. How many times have we caught ourselves staring into nothingness, sadly but lovingly remembering a past event? Who has not remembered with enormous sadness but great love the caresses and kisses of their deceased grandparents?

No word in Spanish is capable of picking up at the same time the feeling coming from the happy memory that also hurts. Something that Portuguese culture has identified, expressing it through the beautiful term saudade. A mysterious word loaded with meaning that many philologists and linguists have studied to determine its origin without fully agreeing. Therefore, it is very difficult to come to terms with its meaning.

Saudade, a powerful word

More than something concrete, this word treasures a collection of emotions and sensations that evoke the remote from the sensations of the present . An essence that Manuel Melo, Portuguese writer, describes as “bem that one suffers and badly that one enjoys” (good that one suffers and bad that one enjoys).

On the other hand, from a philosophical perspective, Ramón Piñero describes this term as a state of mind derived from a feeling of loneliness. In turn, the various forms of loneliness lead to different modes of loneliness: that which we appreciate in our circumstances (objective) and that which we experience in our intimacy (subjective).

Other explanations relate it to those attempts to return to that basic security through the death instinct, as Dr. Novoa Santos explains, or to the emotional awakening caused by the place of origin. As we see, a whole range of meanings that come together in a psychological state.

Beyond nostalgia

Although saudade is identified as nostalgia or melancholy, the fragrance of its essence transcends the walls of this meaning. To feel it is not only to miss, but also to transcend that feeling to take awareness of the importance that certain people and moments have had in our lives. Knowing that nothing will be the same to the inner moment and the shared experiences.

As we have said, this term refers to the breaking of the wave on the beach of our consciousness. A churning of the sea in which absence becomes present, flooding our interior.

It is then when we evoke those eyes with which we will never connect again, the skin that we will never touch or the smell of the place where we grew up, the playground of our childhood, while we witness the timid but constant fall of the sun on the horizon, making Breda. Saudade is the meeting point between the joy of memory and the sadness of absence.

Romantics understand this very well. Because, as the writer and actor Miguel Falabella says, The saudade that hurts the most is the one that comes from the person for whom love has not died. That which corresponds to the emptiness that comes from knowing that it is impossible to be together again, but at the same time accepting it as destiny, remembering how happy we were while a breeze of sadness caresses the back of our necks.

Relieve the bittersweet taste of memory

Saudade hurts, but it implies happiness through one of its edges because, by feeling it, we transcend what we feel. We go further to remember happiness and feel sadness, knowing that it is impossible to recover the feeling that was once pleasurable to us.

It’s like learning to savor the most bittersweet facet of memory. That which integrates its most opposite poles and finds a certain balance that sometimes comforts us.

Definitely, Saudade means feeling life with every pore of our skin and learning to value everything that surrounds us. Every moment, every detail, every person can awaken in us this emotional state that places us between sorrow and happiness. And you, when do the saudades catch you?

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