My sober sisters and I have been circling around a particular emotion lately, that bittersweet wave that washes over you at weddings, graduations, anniversaries. You know the one: where time suddenly feels both infinite and gone in an instant.

One of my friends Pam asked if there was a better word than “nostalgia” for this feeling, and we’ve spent days trying to capture it. It’s that moment when a memory surfaces so vividly you can close your eyes and actually be there again, feel the flutters in your stomach, the excitement in your veins, your heart swelling with love and gratitude. But alongside that joy comes the longing, the slight ache of realizing how long ago it was, how quickly it passed, and maybe a tinge of regret that you didn’t fully embrace it in the moment.

Sound familiar?

The Gift of Sober Clarity

Here’s what we’ve discovered together: this heightened awareness, this rawness of memory and emotion, it’s a gift of sobriety. With clear minds, we’re experiencing the full spectrum of life without the blur, without the eject buttons and lost time. No more moving through life in a drugged state. We’re awake. Present. Here.

And this realization has become our rallying cry: we must live in the now and embrace today. As another dear friend Renee says so beautifully, “Fill your TODAY.”

Our Marco Polo video exchanges capture this perfectly; snapshots of the fleeting “now,” robust with spontaneous thoughts, reactions, laughter, tears, and yes, some fierce cussing. We’re like stones dropped in a reflecting pool, creating ripples that shimmer and connect us, witnessing and celebrating each other’s lives as they unfold. We learn and grow from each other, reminded daily of this significant lesson: be in the today.

The Word We’ve Been Searching For

After days of mulling this over, searching through quotes and the words of great thinkers, I found it. The internet gifted me the Portuguese word saudade (pronounced sow-DAH-deh), and I literally yelled “HURRAH!”

Saudade is an emotional state of melancholic or profoundly nostalgic longing for a beloved yet absent someone or something. It derives from the Latin word for solitude. In Cape Verdean Creole, it’s sodade, a deep and sad longing for something or someone lost, infused with nostalgia and wistfulness.

The beautiful part? I’ve been listening to Cesaria Evora’s song “Sodade” for thirty years without knowing what the word truly meant. The answer was right there all along, waiting for this moment in my life when I was ready to understand it.

Listen to “Sodade” and you’ll feel it, that emotion no English word can quite capture, but we all recognize with a knowing glance.

Living with Saudade

Antonio Carlos Jobim, the legendary bossa nova musician, similarly captured this emotion in his song “Chega de Saudade” (loosely translated as “No More Blues” or “Enough of Longing”). The lyrics speak to returning home, and “home” here is deeply symbolic, resonating on so many levels:

No more blues, I’m going back home
No, no more blues, I promise no more to roam
Home is where the heart is
The funny part is my heart’s been right there all along

No more tears and no more sighs
And no more fears, I’ll say no more goodbyes
If travel beckons me, I swear I’m gonna refuse
I’m gonna settle down and there’ll be no more blues

Saudade isn’t just sadness or nostalgia, it’s both at once, mixed with love and longing and the profound awareness of time’s passage. And in sobriety, we feel it all more deeply because we’re finally awake to experience it.

This is our gift: the clarity to witness these moments as they happen, to hold them tenderly, to feel them fully. No more blurred memories. No more wondering what we missed. Just the raw, beautiful, sometimes achingly sweet experience of being alive and aware.

So here’s to filling our today, sisters. Here’s to saudade and the knowing glances we share. Here’s to being awake enough to feel it all.

Your listening companion: Cesaria Evora, “Sodad” on Miss Perfumado (album): https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Mo4dmYifj0U