Standing atop Sacré-Cœur, looking down I saw many people, be them tourists or citizens, walking around, going in and out of shops and I got hit with ‘sonder’.
‘Sonder n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, 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.’
Even though, it was not my first sonder experience it still made me somewhat pensive. It made me reevaluate the significance of my existence to the world.
But as I write this at a coffee shop in Brunei, I see others enjoying their coffee, doing work on their laptops, engaging in conversations that I am not privy of... I realized, these people, while insignificant to my life, they are significant to others - their families, their friends, maybe even their co-workers.
We cannot be a recurring character in everybody’s stories, why there are 7 billion people on Earth for goodness sake. At the very best we can only be a passing extra and that’s okay. That brings me to my favourite quote from the final episode of Scrubs:
"I guess it’s because we all want to believe that what we do is very important, that people hang onto our every word, that they care what we think. The truth is: you should consider yourself lucky if you even occasionally get to make someone, anyone, feel a little better. After that it’s all about the people that you let into your life."
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