Sonder
-The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as your own, which they are constantly living despite your lack of awareness of it.
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Everybody is living whole lives, and we’ll never know about it. Doesn’t that make you sad? If anything, it makes me Sonder.
In planet X, maybe each time we cross paths with strangers on Earth, a lightning bolt appears from the electric charges of the richness and intricacy of our private lives. Someone is celebrating a birthday, and we’ll never be invited. The last two digits of our phone number are exactly the age they are turning, and we don’t even know.
What if the nurse in purple lipstick fixing cannulas on patients’ hands is worried about her ovaries? She just says “get well,” and if only we knew, we’d tell her the same.
That tall 40-year-old man you see leaning on a beam must miss his mom, I swear. Or maybe not, who knows. He just checks his phone and sighs, shoelaces tied nice and neat, and flicks off invisible dirt from his clothes. Is he low-key OCD? Did his mom teach him? Did he even have a mom to start with? Well, we’ll never know.
It’s a young couple holding hands thinking they’ll end up together. What’s her name? Look at her curls. Does she have a haircare routine? Does her dad know about this man she’s hanging out with? He’s got a tattoo that looks like her dad might disapprove. Or maybe her dad has a tattoo too. Maybe he’ll get along with his son in-law after all. Or maybe the couple will soon find out they’re not compatible, and never get married at all. Who knows?
See, I’m just saying, there are all these depths to people that we’ll never get to know. And I think being more aware of sonder will make us approach people with genuine interest and respect, even if it’s only a single minute we meet them in this lifetime.
Even if it’s nothing but silence and the sound of motor engines filling the space between you and the stranger on the bus, I hope you know their bad taste in fashion is just a shell. Like an egg, there are whole other layers to get to the yellow of the yolk in their lives.
So, if you have the privilege of knowing somebody, really get to know them.
Because your mom is just a random lady who looks angry to someone else. And your dad is silently being judged by the way he wears his belt.
Don’t let it all become sonder, when you could have known them all sinews and souls deep.