Sonder – A Concept to Ponder – Deep Life Reflections

Have you ever had that epiphany, where you are sitting in your car or in a crowded space, completely aware of every minute detail of your complex inner world and external circumstances, when suddenly you make the profound realization that everyone else around you is experiencing a reality just as rich and deep?

Of course, somewhere in the back of your mind there is the vague understanding of this concept but it doesn’t quite pierce you until you have that poignant breakthrough. Until you are simultaneously fully aware of your own fantastically, multi-layered composition of experiences and life circumstances and the magnitude of this same miracle existing within every single person that currently bombards your field of vision.

For a moment you feel like you have touched the finger of God and appreciate a finer element to the miracle of existence. You feel reverence and awe. You feel humbled. In that moment you have been afforded a life-changing glimpse of your small role in a much grander context of the world. That realization spawns the outward extrapolation to your broader interrelationship to the cosmos, universe and beyond.

As we grow older, the gift of life and the depths of its value grow stronger in our awareness. Truly, an entire world exists within our consciousness and yet, as powerful and all consuming as that  illusion devours our attention, a seemingly infinite amount of beings that surround us each contain a world just as profound. Remarkable.

Looking at this image and imagining yourself as one of the pinpoints of light in this tremendous sea should really strike you. Take a moment to just sort of get lost in it.

At some point in time I may have been one of those points of light passing you by and now you sit at a computer screen reading my words.

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 blue or traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.