sonder

"Yesterday I had a really lovely chat with a very very old friend, one who has seen the worst and the best of me, and one of the things we covered in a wide-ranging conversation was the idea of sonder -- that every person you pass on the street, sit by on the bus, has their own story that is just as complex, weird, amazing, beautiful, and interesting to them as yours is to you. The time this really hits me is stuck in a traffic jam, trying to imagine the complex lives of every other person stuck in a car, but it can hit any time." Rob Oseyo

So there's a word for that. I remember how vivid that sense was all of a sudden at the time I became a Christian, early in Grade Eleven. In my experience it was all bound up together; I'm not the centre of the universe any more than all these other people (curiously enough, fifty years later the specific moment of realization was also on a bus), and Someone IS the centre of the universe. Who "has seen the worst and best of me." Who cares more than I do about all those other people, and about me. I'm not only much smaller and less important than I had always thought, I also matter infinitely more than I imagined, and so do all those other people. 

I knew a girl who lived on the North Shore of Vancouver. At night she would look out at the vast city spread out below her, all those lights. And she would become frightened. As though she would shrink away to nothing. Too many lives, and she was so small, and getting smaller.