Imagine yourself on deck on a sailboat, on a day when the gusts propel you forward at an eager pace, with the wind whipping through your hair, feeling not seasick but at one with the vitality of the vessel as it slices through the waves.
This is the emotion of hwyl, a Welsh term for how it feels to have the wind in your sails, even if you are standing on dry land, perhaps even if you are not outside to feel the literal wind at all.
Hwyl is a nautical experience, at least in a figurative sense, and so it cannot be pinned down to just one solid state. Hwyl is also used in Wales to refer to the broad category of emotion itself. A Welshman might ask, “Sut hwyl oedd arno fe?”… translated roughly as what kind of mood was upon him?
It is as if, for the Welsh, an emotion is like gust of wind that whips around us, carrying us where it will. How could such a fluid experience be captured on a digital facial scan, or with a heart rate monitor?
