A moment of transcendence
Sonder, is that you?
Since I was a young girl I experienced the profound feeling that everyone, including strangers I will never know, has a complex life and internal world of their own that exists despite my personal lack of awareness of it.
This feeling would swell in me when I sat long enough to observe, often overwhelming me to the point of tears.
A picture of a young woman walking in vast fields, an ant under star-studded skies, a picture of a swarm of people crossing roads from all angles in Tokyo, a picture of an old man sitting on the same park bench with his newspaper each morning.
It is something about seeing the vastness and individuality of life all at once - my mind opening itself to the multitude of realities existing in one moment, my heart feeling the hurt and joy and loneliness and uncertainty of life as a truly human experience.
I recently discovered that this feeling is shared. It was named in 2012 by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
"Koenig coined hundreds of words and collected them in his best-selling book, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, for specific emotions or feelings that have no English word to encapsulate them.”
I hadn’t been visited by sonder in a while. Enveloped in my own journey of healing perhaps I was disconnected from the natural frequencies of the world around me. But I was sitting by the river the other morning watching the rowers and ducks bob past - and there it was again.
A glimmer of sonder expanded into a sunbeam heating my chest, my heart, and my throat. Tears pricked at my eyes. Air found new routes into my lungs. The earth rose to meet my feet.
Experiencing this flood of feelings I wondered why those rowers were out so early. What drove them to commit to such a sport? Are they running away from something? Or is the silence of the river where they find their joy?
I felt connected to these people I had never seen before, and will probably never know, by the obscurity of it all: the uncertainty we each traverse, challenges we each overcome, and feelings we each learn to live with.
I was explaining to a friend the other day that as a child I would observe people and make up the stories of their lives in my mind. I would give them feelings and families and histories and interests. I wonder, though, if this was less a game and more an experience of sonder - an acknowledgment and a feeling of the invisible and the unknown, and an understanding of its vastness.
We all carry hurt. We all experience fear. We all seek moments of wonder.
It’s like the saying, “you don’t know what other people are going through, so be kind”.
My experience of sonder is one of relief. In those feelings I see myself for what I am; a floating speck in this vast universe. My perspective zooms out and suddenly I’m flying over and above the earth watching life unfold. Not just my life, everybody’s life. I’m seeing the crossroads, the scars, the indecisions, the connections. For these brief moments I am somewhere other than in my direct reality, free from the minutia.
As someone who is well versed in the particulars, someone with a brain that seeks out detail and patterns, someone who believes in honesty and clarity and truth, I am refreshed by the experience of giving it all up for a moment of transcendence.
I cannot control it, I cannot call on it, I cannot manufacture it, but when it arises I welcome it.
Until next week - with love,
Charlie xoxo
P.s.
To date I have published my videos on YouTube. But as I am experimenting with giving up YouTube as a consumer, I am intrigued to find an alternative home for my videos too. So I will try sharing my videos here in my weekly letters instead, where they will remain free thanks to my paid subscribers who generously support my work. I hope you enjoy this video log!
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I used to have this feeling all the time too! I used to imagine what people did in their internal lives, when they were at home on their own, and I loved knowing there were endless possibilities and vast, complex view this would give me about the world.
Lately I’ve lost this feeling too and I feel disconnected to people and the world around me, that feeling of wonder has left me to the point I’m finding it hard to know what to say to people or find what they are saying to me interesting.
I honestly think this is due to my overconsumption of social media- everyone sharing every aspect of their lives online has removed the mystery around the endless possibilities of who someone is, what they are thinking and how they are living their lives.
In the last few weeks, I’ve deleted TikTok and Instagram and can slowly feel my sonder creeping back in, phew!
I love your writing. I think we feel connected to these people we’ve never met because we ARE them in a way - based on the idea that we’re all universal consciousness experiencing itself. Some of us can feel it more deeply - maybe more so when we’re connected to ourselves.