Beautiful Words...
SONDER
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.
This word captures a feeling I've felt so many times in the past and I still find myself thinking deeply about it quite often. It's a beautiful word, a fairly new word to the english language actually which makes it even more intriguing. In Afrikaans it means without.
Sonder is a feeling and a concept that makes the idea of 'being' different than one would normally think. The reality that we are actually supporting characters, extras or even somewhat of props in each other stories gives confirmation to the idea that we all live in different worlds and are experiencing completely different realities. Something I think we know but don't appreciate and respect in the depth that we should. The idea of being nothing more than a light in the dusk illuminating from a window in the background of someone else's story versus being the main character, the end all be all of our own story is a simple yet complex and beautiful thought.
Sonder...