Word for the day: Ambedo The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows describes ambedo as this: n. a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee—which leads to a dawning awareness of the haunting fragility of life . . . .
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows was created to find words for emotions which we feel, that do not quite have a word for that particular, intricate feeling in traditional dictionaries of our modern languages. On another site the word ambedo is found beside the heading of “Thoroughly Depressing Word of the Day.” On this site (BK Words Worth Knowing), it says that ambedo is this: “briefly soaking in the experience of being alive, an act that is done purely for its own sake.”
I am not sure why ambedo and its meaning is considered to be “thoroughly depressing.” I am not quite sure why a word, that seems to me, to mean mindfulness which is also filled with deep emotion and appreciation, comes off as depressing. I find it more depressing how mindlessly and unmoved we seem to go through our lives a lot of the time. We get into habitual robotic action, often forgetting what we last did. We drive along in beautiful scenes full of nature and notice that everyone in these scenes are hunched over their phones, oblivious to the miraculous vitality teeming all around them. We stay in the dramatic, antagonizing stories created in our heads, while we miss the epic novels of being present in our every living moments, while being willing to fully feel the emotions and sensations which this presence brings to us.
Readers, let’s take some time today with ambedo. Let’s light a candle and stare at the flickering flame. Let’s watch water trickle into a fountain, and hear its light touch as it falls to the pool of water calmly catching it below. Let’s watch a precious pet napping in the sunshine and notice how the sunlight highlights the intricacies of fur and patterns of the fur slowly rising and falling to the vital breathing of our beloved companion. Perhaps what we really feel when we allow ourselves some rare ambedo moments, is an overwhelming, lump-in-the-throat awe of the incredible miracle of life. Perhaps the depression only comes about as an after-effect of ambedo, because we realize how little of our own lives we spend in the pure astonishment of the amazing, yet fleeting experience of it all. We worry about being in ambedo states as “wasting time”, and yet what ambedo does for us, is makes us come to the realization of how we waste so much of our living experience ignoring the true experience of real, tactile, beautiful, in-the-moment sensory life.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.