Sonder

"Sonder. You are the main character—the protagonist—the star at the center of your own unfolding story. You're surrounded by your supporting cast: friends and family hanging in your immediate orbit. Scattered a little further out, a network of acquaintances who drift in and out of contact over the years. But there in the background, faint and out of focus, are the extras. The random passersby. Each living a life as vivid and complex as your own. They carry on invisibly around you, bearing the accumulated weight of their own ambitions, friends, routines, mistakes, worries, triumphs and inherited craziness. When your life moves on to the next scene, theirs flicker in place, wrapped in a cloud of backstory and inside jokes and characters strung together with countless other stories you'll never be able to see. That you'll never know exists. 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." The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a compendium of invented words written by John Koening. I chanced upon it just the other night, while googling the meaning of the word “Sonder”. Each original definition of a word aims to fill a hole in the English language—to give name to emotions that we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for. It is a beautiful attempt at giving words to something that words cannot describe. The narrator tells a hunting tale of how self-important we think ourselves to be. He reminds us of the random passers-by that we fail to say hello to; how they, too, are burdened by the weight of their ambition—trying to achieve success as Society demands it, or simply trying to find themselves. He gives words to a certain kind of sadness, emptiness, loneliness, or confusion that we cannot explain. Often we look around to find answers to what we term as “the purpose of our existence”, but why do we fail to seek these answers by looking inside ourselves? Who knows, maybe after all that searching, we find that there ain’t any special purpose at all. We mechanically live a life so preoccupied with ourselves, that our failure to realise that those around us are fighting a hard battle too only makes us less human. He reminds us we often think ourselves to be self-important, and as the protagonist of our slow unfolding story, that we find it impossible to imagine a world without ourselves. It has been argued that most of us “suffer chronically from a poor adjustment to existence: We compulsively fancy ourselves to be more important than we are, and behave as though the world exists only for our sake.” Koening’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows offers a poignant and evocative insight into the subtle ripples below the hustle and bustle of life - sights that most people never stop to seek, hear, or feel. In his other videos, he tells you how unique you are, and that there are 7 billion others just as unique as you. He brings up the irony of how we go to school, and learn to forget. He reminds us of the fragility of our existence, how we take it for granted that tomorrow is always going to come, and how life always moves forward. It’s time to stop and think. Just for a moment, forget about the relentless pursuit of God-knowswhat, and click on the links below to be enticed by a lexicon of words that tug at your heartstrings. ~ · Anemoia: Nostalgia For A Time You’ve Never Known “There’s an old saying. The past is a different country, they do things differently there.” · Avenoir: The Desire To See Memories In Advance “You can see where you’ve been, but not where you’re going.” · Oleka: The Awareness of How Few Days Are Memorable “But the truth is, most of life is forgotten instantly, almost as it’s happening.” · Onism: The Awareness of How Little of the World You'll Experience “But if someone were to ask you on your death bed, what it was like to live here on earth, perhaps the only honest answer would be: ‘I don’t know. I passed through it once, but I’ve never really been there.’” · Opia: The Ambiguous Intensity of Eye Contact “We offer up a sample of who we are, of what we think people want us to be. But so rarely do we stop to look inside.” · Sonder: The Realisation that everyone has a story “You are the main character—the protagonist—the star at the center of your own unfolding story.” · Vemödalen: The Fear That Everything Has Already Been Done “You are unique. There are 7 billion others just as unique as you.”

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