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.
from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
I remember feeling sonder at a very young age. Back then, it came with a twinge of disgust. We all walk around with entire universes in our minds, yet at another scale we’re just undifferentiated ants bumbling about. I was embarrassed by the banality of the human condition and my complicity in the belief that there was anything special about my own little world.
These days, as I drive and walk and work and live among all the other humans, I think about the entire universes in each person’s mind. Entire universes. Billions of infinite universes all around me. Instead of the sameness of repetition, I see a blur of traffic passing millions of lighted windows merging into an exquisite endless bright light.