Life isn’t so simple as to be explained or personified beyond the present moment. We as conscious entities label our lives based on our personal experiences and tragedies, and we try so hard to express our interpretations through language, imagery, and verbalization. We try to express these things in hope that we will belong somewhere, with someone, doing something, but it’s hopeless. Still, the reality of our situation is that every method of communication available to our fleshy little bodies simply cannot fully express what we’ve always tried to. Maybe such communication will never be transmutable, maybe it will, but as of the present, we are confined to simply respect and become sensitive to the fact that we will never know another person how they know themselves. With this rather elementary realization comes a dramatic perspective change: a sonder awareness.
The word “sonder” represents the awareness that each and every other person is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. The realization of this existential truth leads us conscious beings towards new respect for the life around us. Many of us operate based on assumptions we deduce about others, commonly known as prejudice, and by acting on these assumptions we are acting out of ignorance to the fact that we simply do not know what we’ve convinced ourselves we know. Our predictions of others are often wrong and the content of others’ character is a mystery we deny the existence of. The truth is, we know absolutely nothing about anyone until we’ve met and exchanged dialogue, energies, perspectives, etc. Presently recognizing that every single life you observe is as vivid and complex as your own is the first step towards breaking these assumptive, ignorant cycles and growing out of these dissociative mindsets.
It’s rather obvious to us personally how complex our lives are, yet so many of us don’t apply this observation in an empathetic manner towards those around us; it simply doesn’t occur to most of us. There’s nothing wrong with this, we cannot help if something doesn’t occur to us as simply as we cannot help that we’ve forgotten to do something. It is out of our control, beyond the awareness of our present mind, and there is nothing wrong with that. But now that I have introduced this awareness to you, you cannot deny it. It is narcissistic to believe that your life is so much more real and stressful and traumatizing than any other. Narcissistic personalities tend to struggle with empathy, which makes sense as to why a sonder awareness would be difficult to apply empathetically to those around such personalities, but one who denies other’s lives as being as real as theirs is one who denies themselves the ability to truly connect with those around them. My life is in no way more real than the life of my brothers, sister, father, or mother. It is in no way more real than the life of my best friend or his family nor more real than the life of the Uber driver and their family and their best friend and their best friend’s family. We may not know the details of all of these lives, and that is because every means of communication available to our fleshy little bodies fails to communicate the complexity of life. It is not because any life is less complex or real than our own, it is because we simply have no means of knowing how complex all of these other lives are.
The lives of those around us are filled to the brim with experiences we have never and will never experience. The experiences are traumas, joys, heartbreaks, relationships, disappointments, accomplishments. They are just as valid as the experiences that have made up our own lives. They’ve simply been experienced by someone else. A life filled with pain and lament is just as real as a life filled with ease and stability, the oppositional nature of these existences expresses itself in various ways to make up the never-ending uniqueness of our societal interactions. Interactions that those who operate based on prejudiced assumptions will never be able to experience. These lives may be quite opposite, but they are equally as necessary and valid in the way that a dark background is necessary to see a light figure, the way that a short stick is necessary to recognize a long one. The oppositional labels we’ve created to perceive and assign order to our reality are both as necessary as one another and are often represented as the concept Yin and Yang. Yin represents things such as darkness, coldness, and emptiness whereas Yang represents things such as light, warmth, and fullness. Both sides of this coin are extremely necessary as each side defines one another: the concept of light could not exist without the concept of dark, sound could not exist without the existence of silence, short could not exist without the observation of tall. It is the observation that something is short that allows us to observe another thing as tall, short defines tall, and it is the observation that something is loud that allows us to observe another thing as quiet, sound defines silence. Get this: it is the observation that a painful traumatized life is vivid and complex that allows us the observation that another’s life of ease and stability is vivid and complex. Our experiences do not define us, they unite us.
Your life and all of its experiences are a part of a duality in our reality in the same way that sound is a part of duality with silence. You can deem the oppositional party of your duality whatever you want: a soulmate, a rival, a stranger, a best friend, but you cannot deem either side of this duality more important than the other. Furthermore, our perception of reality is subjective to each and every individual, who is to say whose perception of reality is correct or in any way “the right way” to perceive reality? There is no such standard and there will never be one. It is the versatility of perception that allows for each and every person to be unique and it is this versatility that allows for the existence of a sonder awareness. If every life was the exact same, it would not be a part of any duality. It would be dull, and life would be lifeless.
Life isn’t so simple as to be explained or personified beyond the present moment. It cannot be explained nor labeled or standardized, only experienced, and as one experiences this life it becomes vivid and complex. We will only ever understand that complexity of our own lives and the denial of this truth is a source of suffering in relationships, self-awareness, and spirituality. I’ve said that our experiences do not define us but rather they unite us, but this unification comes at a cost: drop the narcissism of your ego telling you that you are in any way more real or important than others. It is good to treat yourself as the most important person in your life, but remember that you are not the most important person in anyone else life no matter how much you would like to believe so. Practice a sonder perspective, only then will you deeply connect with those around you, and only once you have experienced that connection will you feel satisfied in communicating the vivid complexities of your life. Only then, will you feel heard and understood. Only then will you find somewhere you belong.
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Guest Author Bio
Jarrett McGuire
Hey everyone! I am a freelance copywriter specializing in areas of Spirituality, Philosophy, Astrology, Quantum Mechanics, E-Commerce, Interior Design, Music, and more! I create loads of art from poetry, music, and dance all the way to fashion and interior design. My articles are written in the diction and tone I personally like to use when I write naturally, but I am very capable of simplifying damn near any idea thrown my way and communicating it effectively and fully. My copywriting optimizes SEO, sticks to a strict deadline schedule, and strategizes testing to get your products and services paying you and fulfilling your dreams! Please reach out to me with any inquires as my skill set is very versatile and I am more than willing to work with you to figure out what works best for the both of us!!
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