So there I was, sitting at a red light on a Tuesday morning. I was drinking my coffee like I always do in the morning on my way to work. I remember it being exceptionally good coffee that morning for some reason, and I don’t for the life of me remember what I did to make it so damn good…whatever. I was on my way to work, sitting at a stop light at Seymour Highway and Brook Ave in Wichita Fal. As I wait for this stupid light to turn green (honestly, I get caught at this thing every day and it serves no purpose in the morning when no one is on the road) when I happen to glance over to a man sitting in a silver Nissan Altima, also enjoying his morning coffee, talking on his cell phone (actually he looked like he was yelling at someone) and going on about his morning.
Then it hit me like a ton of bricks, like its done a thousand times before. He makes a car payment on that Nissan. He makes a phone payment for that cell phone. He made that coffee! To some of you, I am babbling. “Of course he made that coffee, duh”. “Yeah, everyone has a car payment”. That’s not what I mean. I mean sitting in that Nissan on that Tuesday morning, was a man that had a complex and vivid life just like you or I. He had friends, family, a job, bills, habits, vices, pet peeves, you name it. He was a normal person with a normal life, and it blows my mind that everyone on the planet is the same way. Everyone you pass in the mall, or drive by on the highway, or work with, or befriend on Facebook has their own life.
There’s a word for this!
Sonder-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.
Which to me sounds a little more like poetry than a definition, but that’s because “Sonder” isn’t a real word. I pulled it out of, believe it or not, a tumblr post! After delving a little further into the internet I found this blog called “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows”, and it’s all about different made up words that describe feelings we have all the time that we might not have actual words for. Every one I have looked at deserves real word status. The blog is based on John Koenig’s “Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” (total coincidence I’m sure) and is just badass. The link is below:
http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com
I was on a site that was explaining the origin of the word as I explained above, and he posted a link to someone asking why it actually had to have a word. Link is here:
I believe as humans, we need to be able to explain thing to other humans. Most of us cannot put that phenomenon into as well as Mr. Koenig and need a word that has meaning behind it to describe it. What is a word? “A word is made up of two parts: a form and meaning. To think of it in programming terms, variable name and variable. The form of a word is the pointer or reference, so this can be either the written or spoken form. This form references a concept or the meaning in your brain. Concepts are complex. That’s why synonyms like frightening and terrifying probably relate to very similar concept boundaries but differ slightly.” That passage was written by Neil…uh…there’s no last name to reference so he’s just Neil. His whole post is below:
http://nieldlr.com/2013/06/curious-case-word-sonder/
However, that was beside my original point. People, a lot of the time, get hung up on themselves. We believe ourselves to be the most important thing in the world. To us individually this may be true; I am definitely on my own most important list. However, the passersby aforementioned above probably have a different list than you do. You are in some cases a body filling space in someone else’s personal little world. You are a body with no face, hanging around for no more than a few seconds. Interestingly enough, my co-blogger and I were talking about memory a few months ago. I wont bore you with all the math, but a shocking 4% of what happens to us and around us in our life is in our permanent memory bank and can be recalled without prompt. Which means the other 96% is either requires special stimulus to bring to the front of our minds, or is cast into the abyss of forgotten things. To those passersby that sit next to you at a stop light in a silver Nissan drinking their coffee, you are a distant thing from a memory.
The complexity of this world never ceases to amaze me. When I think about all those people with amazing life stories, it makes me want to talk to people and ask them about their life. Everyone is a separate book in an inconceivably big book series that all happens at the same time. Kind of like the movie Pulp Fiction, where there is multiple stories going on at the same time, but they all go together and all end up in the same spot. It’s just different people playing different parts in the world around each other. At this exact point in time, what are the other 7 billion humans on the planet doing? They’re doing something. Just like you’re reading a blog post, they were occupying their time with something else. Can you just take a few minutes and actually try to picture and comprehend that?
Something my co-blogger is known for is being a giant quote library. He’s got quotes for everything, by just about anyone. One of the quotes he listed when talking about this subject was by the famous artist Vincent Van Goh. “There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one comes to warm himself by it, and the passersby see only a wisp of smoke”. The man had a way of illustrating words.
The other is by Plato, and it goes like “Be kind to all for everyone is fighting a hard battle”. Which is along the same lines as what I’ve described today, Plato is just telling you to be nice to the extras around you. I try to live by a similar…yet not so similar rule of life. Be kind and courteous to everyone you meet, but have a plan to kill them if the need arises”.
I like mine better. 🙂
This post was written while listening to Disciple’s album “Horseshoes and Hand Grenades”. And it was posted an hour late because I fell asleep listening to said album last night. Hope you enjoyed it though!
Until next time, my friends, stay safe!
Daniel “THE” Perry
DOUBLE BARREL 