Up: [[Words, Beautiful and Otherwise]] Created: 2022-06-14 A fake word > [!Orbit] The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows > > 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. This word describes the feeling I have on early winter mornings when Toffee and I walk past the lighted windows of houses. Sometimes I see people in the rooms but more often they are empty and I have the sense of people having just left them. I imagine the people busily preparing for their day or relaxing in the cosiness of their home with a good book and a cup of coffee. Most of the time Sonder makes me feel connected to the world, a point in the web of intersecting lives.