33 Experiences We Don’t Have English Words For Yet

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Khánh Hmoong
  1. When sunlight shines through the trees, the interplay between light and leaves. 
  2. When you’re with your friends and decide “who is who” in a show or movie you all watch and then laugh hysterically about how “them” that character is behaving. (2a.) The running joke that develops around you characterizing the members of your social circle based on some cultural stencil. (Think: Sex & the City).
  3. The feeling of your skin on someone else’s.
  4. The temporary, beautiful high of deciding you’re going to change your life in some aesthetic, easy way. (4a.) The conviction that this will change anything or everything else.
  5. The inability to grasp the fact that we can’t grasp what we don’t know yet.
  6. Hearing something a dozen times and then finally understanding what it means only when it becomes the answer to a problem you have.
  7. When physical, human age has no bearing on connectedness, intelligence, ability.
  8. The parenting style that consists of trying to punish, embarrass, scold and oppress children into being functional, kind, successful members of society.
  9. Wanting to have a spiritual-sexual experience with someone, sex that is more than just a grinding race to orgasm.
  10. The mental preparation that occurs before you step into a social situation in which you have to play a “role” for the sake of maintaining a relationship: i.e. rehearsing your conversations with yourself by yourself.
  11. The feeling of absolute peacefulness right before you fall asleep.
  12. Not just assuming we know what other people are thinking and feeling, but acting on that “knowing,” judging them for that knowing, and really in a lot of ways capping off their potential with what we think we know of them.
  13. The feeling of lightness in your whole body.
  14. The love you know has an expiration date.
  15. The love you know you’re eventually “meant” for.
  16. People who are funny without being mean.
  17. People who are deep without being negative.
  18. The frustration you feel when somebody is mad or upset over completely false things that they’ve made up in their mind, a complete lack of understanding on a situation.
  19. The random, weird, scary, embarrassing thoughts that cross your mind and sometimes freak you out that you think you’re alone in having because everybody else is scared and embarrassed by them too.
  20. The art of trying to figure out someone’s intentions by piecing together a bunch of random bits of “evidence.” 
  21. The kind of stuck feeling of knowing something isn’t quite right, but you’re not yet aware of what the alternative would be.
  22. The comfort that comes with arriving at small, safe conclusions now and again.
  23. The real peace of dissolving those illusions.
  24. The feeling of realizing that your “purpose” won’t usually feel like a “purpose” as you have to do the work regardless and so the whole act of “finding it” was just a mechanism of the ego in the first place.
  25. How we define periods of our lives and personal development beyond years or grades or segments of schooling.
  26. The space between raindrops.
  27. A course of study that teaches you the art of the non-traditionally-academic things that take up the majority of our lives: love, relationships, doubt, faith, parenting, work, friendship, self-image etc.
  28. Being in love with someone who you only used to know, and at some level still feel as though you do.
  29. The happy tired feeling you get after you eat a big meal.
  30. The sensation of looking back on something far more fondly than when it was actually happening; the idea that maybe this kind of enjoyment is not to be fought or transcended, but just appreciated for what it is.
  31. The feeling of feeling a feeling.
  32. A person or thing that also feels like “home;” (a non-house home.)
  33. The mind fuck of an idea that is “all is as it should be.” Thought Catalog Logo Mark