Something I think about a lot is the idea of sonder. I read about it many years ago in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
Here’s what it means:
sonder
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
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This stuck with me, and it’s something I think about almost daily. It’s a reminder to be empathetic. A reminder that we all have a story.
It’s easy to forget that everyone you interact with is the main character in their own story, and you’re just an unnamed extra in one scene — “Impatient Guy in Traffic #2.”
Sure, you might be a supporting actor in the stories of your family and close friends, but for 99.99999% of the world you don’t even exist in any real sense. You’re not a part of their story, just as they are not a part of yours…
But there is one story that we’re all a part of; the Big Story. It’s a story we write together, without ever consciously doing so.
Here we all are, living as the main characters in our own separate stories, but we’re together on this beautiful blue-green rock in the middle of the vast nothingness of space. An infinitesimal speck in the universe, our individual story timelines completely irrelevant in the cosmic scheme of things. But when you put all those interconnected stories together, over the entire span of humanity’s history and future, the timeline of our shared story grows. The future is pure potential.
Anyway, just some morning musings I wanted to share.
I’m glad to have you all in my story, and to play a small part of yours.
And I’m glad we’re all part of a larger story that’s still being written. We’ll never see how it ends, but we may as well make our part in it as exciting and beautiful as possible.
Good morning.
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