Where Love Exceeds Language—and We Learn to Listen

There’s a feeling I have sometimes while watching my son sleep—something beyond love, beyond protection, beyond the simple joy of parenthood. It’s closer to a kind of cosmic gratitude mixed with terror, the recognition that this person is both part of me and completely separate from me, that I would die for him but cannot live his life for him. The feeling has weight, texture, specific gravity, but no name in any language I know.

Some thoughts live in territories that language has never colonized.

I’ve searched through Bengali, English, even attempted to find words in other languages through books and conversations, but the feeling remains untranslatable. It exists in the space before vocabulary, in the realm of pure experience that hasn’t been organized into communicable form.

The loneliness isn’t just about being unable to share the thought—it’s about being unsure whether the thought truly exists if it can’t be expressed. Without words, experience becomes ghostly, questionable, like a dream you can almost remember but can’t quite recall upon waking.

We are all citizens of internal countries that exist on no map.

My wife asks what I’m thinking about when she catches me staring into space, and I realize the honest answer would require inventing a new vocabulary. I’m thinking about the particular sadness of being alive in time, knowing that everything I love is temporary, but simultaneously the particular gratitude for being conscious enough to recognize this temporality.

The thought has components that existing words can capture separately—mortality, love, awareness, sadness, gratitude—but the specific way these elements combine in my mind creates something new, unnamed, unnameable with current linguistic tools.

“Nothing,” I tell her, because how do you explain that you’re thinking about something that doesn’t exist in language? How do you communicate the experience of having thoughts that language can’t accommodate?

The most profound human experiences happen in the spaces between words.

I think about the moment I first held my son, the exact quality of emotion that coursed through me in that hospital room. It wasn’t just happiness or love or relief or wonder—it was all of these and something else entirely, something that felt like recognition of my own mortality and immortality simultaneously, like meeting someone I’d always known but had never seen before.

Years later, I still can’t name what I felt in that moment. The existing vocabulary of parental emotion feels inadequate, like describing a symphony using only the word “music.” The experience exists in my memory with perfect clarity, but remains untranslatable into any language I share with others.

Some feelings are too large for the containers words provide.

I watch my wife experience something similar when she tends her plants on the balcony. There’s an expression that crosses her face—concentration mixed with tenderness mixed with something I can’t identify—that suggests she’s accessing some form of understanding that exists beyond articulation.

When I ask her what she’s thinking about, she struggles to explain. “It’s just… watching things grow,” she says, but I can see in her eyes that the actual thought is more complex, more specific, more precise than those words can carry.

Language is a fishing net—it catches many thoughts but the most interesting ones slip through the holes.

The isolation comes not just from being unable to communicate these unnamed thoughts, but from being uncertain whether others have similar experiences. Maybe everyone carries untranslatable thoughts, private emotional experiences that exist in the pre-linguistic realm of consciousness. Maybe we’re all lonely in this specific way, surrounded by shared vocabulary but harboring unshared meanings.

Or maybe these wordless thoughts are evidence of some kind of cognitive or emotional dysfunction, signs that my mind operates differently from normal human psychology. Without the validation that shared language provides, I can’t be certain whether my untranslatable thoughts are universal human experiences or personal aberrations.

We need words not just to communicate but to validate our own consciousness.

My son sometimes pauses in the middle of playing, gets a distant look in his eyes, then shakes his head as if clearing away thoughts too complex for his current vocabulary. I wonder what untranslatable experiences he’s having, what feelings he’s encountering that his eleven-year-old language can’t accommodate.

“What were you just thinking about?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says, and I recognize the particular frustration in his voice—not the “I don’t know” of not paying attention, but the “I don’t know” of having thoughts that resist verbal formulation.

Perhaps the most honest conversations happen when we admit the limits of our vocabulary.

I’m learning to make peace with the untranslatable thoughts, to accept that consciousness might be larger than language can contain. These wordless experiences might not be problems to solve but territories to inhabit, private countries of meaning that belong only to me.

Maybe the goal isn’t to find words for every thought but to recognize that some experiences are meant to remain in their original, unedited form—pure consciousness before it’s processed through the machinery of communication.

What thoughts do you carry that have no names? What feelings live in the spaces your vocabulary cannot reach? And what would it mean to be comfortable with the beautiful loneliness of consciousness that exceeds language?

The untranslatable thoughts might be the most precious ones—proof that human experience is larger than human expression, evidence that we contain infinities that no finite vocabulary could ever capture.