To Sonder

I’ve been reading the “Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” by John Koenig, an irresistibly textured book about feeling. So I’ve decided to kick off this weeks blog with a word for the week and a musing from this Pandora’s box of obscurities.

I quote: “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows defines new words for emotions that we all feel but don’t have the language to express”

Our word of the week is “Sonder”. Have you ever had Sonder before?

“Sonder” Definition — “The feeling you get when you realise that each random passerby is the main character of their own story, living a life just as vivid and complex as your own, in which you are just an extra in the background”. (Via the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows).

Some people are hit with this realization while looking at the windows of apartments buildings from the outside. I know in Beijing in particular, we are often in a courtyard style apartments where the outside of our windows are met with the windows of residing strangers, and when we see the yellow haze of their interior lights, we can be confronted with an awakening that in every apartment is a life as complex as our own.

We can become overwhelmed by the enormity of the world and the number of souls in it that have their own unique stories, their own set of unique challenges and intricacies, and that in contemplating this, you realise that others are not just props in the background of your own narrative. They too have sorrow, pain, trauma, joy, new life, and loss.

We can become so consumed by our own world stage, we forget that we are a part of a much bigger tapestry, a tapestry of emotional journeys and relationships that can sometimes break down and we resist pardoning those who have hurt us. Forgiveness comes from the Latin word “perdonare”, meaning to “give completely, and without reservation. And we do not wonder through this particular emotional landscape alone.

In our first lecture of the Talks on Tap series, “From Hurt to Healing: Harnessing The Power of Forgiveness,” Dr. Moffett of Tsinghua University, delved into this very intimate but shared human challenge, exploring how forgiveness can transform pain into personal growth and emotional well-being. The psychological impact of holding unto bitterness hinders our ability to access the kind of freedom that fosters inner peace and gives us sanctuary. Holding unto hurt, hurts. We become the gatekeepers of our own joy. Distilled to its essence, to forgive is to heal. We must give our pain language no matter the degree of difficulty we sometimes have in defining and expressing our deeper emotions, one pardon at a time, one word at a time.

And on that note, I will close with this:

“Words will never do us justice. But we have to try anyway. Luckily, the palette of language is infinitely expandable. If we wanted to, we could build a new linguistic framework to fill in the gaps, this time rooted in our common humanity, our shared vulnerability, and our complexity as individuals – we could catalogue even the faintest quirks of the human condition, even things that were only ever felt by one person. In language all things are possible. Which means that no emotion is untranslatable. No sorrow is too obscure to define. We just have to do it”. (via the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows).