SONDER

Every once in awhile when I am at the gas station filling up my tank I have a profound moment.  I believe things come to me as I am standing filling up my tank because it is one of the few times that I am just standing and thinking.  My son calls it gas station wisdom.  

On this particular day I was watching a woman about my age filling her tank and I came to the realization that this woman was living a life as complex as my own but entirely different than mine.  She had her own history, family, friends, job, routines and worries all unique to her.    That although we would both be leaving this gas station around the same time we were each heading out to a life that was utterly and totally different than the other’s.  And then I started thinking about all of the other people that were living such infinitely different lives than I was - even my siblings who were brought up in the same house by the same parents are living totally different lives with different memories and whose lives were affected by the experiences of our youth differently.  That everyone around us and everyone we don’t even know exist are living epic stories that we will never know about in which we may be just a bit player, an extra sipping coffee in the background or leaving a store as they enter, or filling our cars with gas at the same gas station.   I am overwhelmed by the thought that all of these complicated and vivid lives are being played out invisibly around me.  That each of these people are the protagonist in their lives just as I am the protagonist in mine.  It’s mind boggling!  

And then, I found out that there is a word that has been made up for this.  It comes from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.  It’s SONDER as in “I am struck by a moment of sonder  as I watch a young woman fill her gas tank.”  This totally blows me away that someone came up with a word for this feeling.  Who knew??? 

Well, then, I had to dig a little deeper and I found another new word - SOLIPSISM.  It is the opposite of sonder.   The philosophy of solipsism asserts that we can only be sure of our own existence because the mind can not prove the existence of anything external, therefore nothing external exists, only the appearance of it.  But I digress.  

Back to SONDER.  

One day when my boys were in middle and high school we were driving along and I pointed to a cow far out in a field.  I told the boys “See that cow.”  They nodded. I said “We are each about as insignificant in this world as a fly on the butt of that cow.”  I don’t know why I thought it important to tell them this at that time.  I suspect that being the ages that they were that I felt they were way too self centered and needed to realize that we were all just flies on the butts of cows and the world and all that it meant was much more important than whether or not they got to play their video games that day or take a trip to Hawaii or get the new bike they were lusting after.  Some days when I am wallowing in self pity over some perceived injustice I have to step back and think about my insignificance in this world and that’s when I come back to sonder.  

But then I am reminded of something I have done in my life that made a huge positive difference to someone else and I think maybe, just maybe I’m not as insignificant as I feel.  I think about how my experience with my son, Jake having seizures lead me to a homeopath that cured him which lead me to talk to my best friend about homeopathy which lead her to tell me about her friend whose 4 year old daughter was having grand mal seizures which lead me to call this friend of hers which lead her to go to my homeopath which lead to her daughter being cured of her seizures.   And for a very short time all of a sudden I am one of the main characters in this woman’s story - this woman who I have never met whose life and story is so very different than my own.  That for a brief time a small part of our story was on a parallel path.

So this makes me realize that I had it all wrong - that it’s not so much that we are insignificant as much as it is that everyone is just as significant as us.  We all live out our complex, everyday lives with our dreams and problems and joys and sorrows and relationships and are also the bit players in other peoples’ complex lives and sometimes our part will be as small as the person standing in line behind them at the grocery store or sitting in the lighted window of a house they pass by and other times it will be a brief but meaningful exchange before we go our separate ways again.  There is no way for us to live only in our own story.  Somehow we will get into the story of others.  

I try to always remember that everyone has a story.  That the direction that their story is going that day or that week or that month is affecting how they behave toward me.  The person who just cut me off in traffic is perhaps rushing home because his wife needed to leave for work and the kids are home alone.  The cashier who just snapped at me maybe just lost her mother who she has been caring for for the past 3 years.  The teenager who was rude to me may come from an abusive home and is just trying to survive.  The neighbor who ignored my greeting possibly just found out they were being laid off.  Life is complex for everyone and taking a moment to be awestruck at the complexity of life and appreciate sonder helps me humanize the strangers around me and in the process be a kinder, gentler me.