I was sitting in the back seat of my parents’ car. A child at the mere age of 7, peering through the glass at the streets, people and houses flying past me. It had been a perfect Sunday. The usual Sunday breakfast of Dosa, the light allusions to potentially going for a swim that would never come to fruition and the family viewing of some movie or another. Though, now looking back I can’t remember exactly why, but later that evening, we got into our car and set off on either a mission to get groceries or an adventure to eat dinner. We turned out of the driveway on to the main road, and I vividly remember chattering away excitedly, my little sister napping next to me.
Eventually, I got tired of talking and decided to gaze out the window instead. My seven-year-old mind pondering the spectacular nature of how fifteen plus fifteen was thirty, and about the starfish, my teacher had shown us in class that week. I thought back in amazement to how starfish could regrow their limbs and then wondered why humans couldn’t. In the midst of my existential pondering, my wavering sight paused on an old man seemingly stumbling out of a house. At first, I thought maybe he’d lost balance and fallen, and so my fleeting mind changed its focus and moved on to the sounds of my three-year-old sister wailing behind me. However, as if due to some cosmic desire to lead me to see more of that man’s story, the traffic light turned red and the car came to a steady halt right next to him. (Although it might help to remember that this took place in Bangkok, Thailand. A place that’s always hustling and bustling with traffic anyway, so it probably was not a cosmic instance, perhaps just a cosmic coincidence.)
Nevertheless, my gaze fell back on the old man who had fallen to the ground and was now slowly trying to steady himself and stand up. Though my heart reached out to him, the locked car door acted as a screen, making the man’s misfortune a movie that I was watching. Perhaps it was that and the implicit remembrance that I was not to talk to strangers, that didn’t even allow the thought of helping him slip into my mind. So, I continued gawking at the scene that was unfolding. Another man walked out, cane in hand, towering over the old man. Though he was skinny and relatively short, something about the presence of the cane made him appear to be larger than life. I suppose power can do that. He was yelling something I could not hear, while the old man muttered something with his hands folded. Pleading perhaps, begging. For what though, I had no idea.
My mind began to race, perhaps they’d fought about dinner or maybe the young man wanted to do something that the old man didn’t, or maybe someone stole the other’s friend or something. My seven-year-old mind couldn’t fathom the more realistic reasons such as perhaps anger issues, domestic abuse, failure to pay rent, alcohol abuse, and all the other myriad of reasons that that atrocity had occurred, and yet, in that moment it was as if a flood gate had opened and I realized that those men both had lives and problems that I would never know or understand. At that moment the car started and as it once again fled past the multitudes of people and houses that inhabited those streets, each face reminded me of a story I would never know, problems I would never understand, and how each person lived a life and was the main character of their own story. Everyone has their own life, own problems and own struggles.
Though I was too young at the time to be able to decipher what this overwhelming feeling was, over the years I’ve learned more and experienced it in different situations and even still am not able to pinpoint exactly what this feeling compiles of, however at least now I have a name for it: Sonder.
Sonder – n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.
John Koenig
https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com
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