Imagine the stillness that lingers after guests leave your home. The laughter has faded, the chairs stand awkwardly empty, and silence seeps into the corners. You’ve cleaned the dishes and folded the blankets, yet something feels unshakably wrong—a hollow in the air, a weight in your chest. This feeling, my friend, has a name: awumbuk.

The Baining people of Papua New Guinea recognize this peculiar emptiness as awumbuk, a word for the melancholy fog that descends after loved ones depart. But awumbuk isn’t just about loneliness; it’s an emotion so distinct it commands its own ritual. The Baining fill a bowl of water and leave it out overnight to absorb the residue of awumbuk. By morning, the water is poured away, washing the heaviness from their spirits. This simple yet profound act shows how cultural interpretations of emotions can shape the way we cope with them.

Now, contrast this with Western ideas about post-departure sadness. In much of Western culture, this feeling is dismissed as mundane. “Empty nest syndrome,” “the blues,” or “post-party depression” are often reduced to fleeting inconveniences, requiring no ceremony beyond scrolling through Instagram to relive the highlights. The ritual of awumbuk might seem curious, even excessive, to someone steeped in individualism and efficiency. But this is precisely where cultural differences in defining emotions like awumbuk become fascinating.

In Western societies, emotions are often treated as internal states—private, personal affairs to be managed individually. The Baining, however, recognize awumbuk as something external, even physical, that lingers in the atmosphere like invisible dust. Their solution is communal, symbolic, and physical: the water bowl collects the emotional residue and allows its release. This contrasts with the Western tendency to intellectualize or compartmentalize feelings.

Yet, isn’t there something enviable about awumbuk? To give sadness a name and a ritual is to honor its place in the human experience. It reminds us that goodbyes, no matter how temporary, deserve acknowledgment. After all, isn’t the ache of awumbuk proof that someone’s presence mattered?

Tiffany Watt Smith’s exploration of awumbuk invites us to rethink how we experience and interpret emotions across cultures. It challenges the notion that sadness is merely an unwelcome guest to be ignored until it leaves. Instead, it offers a poignant, almost playful perspective: sadness can be shared, rinsed away, or simply named. And in naming it, perhaps we can learn to sit with its bittersweet beauty, knowing it, too, shall pass—like water poured into the earth.