There is a blog on Tumblr called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which posts definitions to words that don't exist, but definitely should. There is a particular word that perfectly defines something I've often felt in public places:
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 has always hit home for me in airports. There's something about airports. Maybe it's the prime people-watching location they provide, but I always find myself becoming acutely aware of how independent other people are to me. Everyone I pass, everyone I passively notice - the mum struggling with her crying child, the lady eating a muffin in Costa, the suited man shopping in Hugo Boss - has a life filled with relatives and friends, ambitions and regrets, moments and memories that have nothing to do with me. Life is pretty incredible. I'm talking about the phenomenon of it. The fact of it. How all-encompassing it is, how wholly overwhelming. How yours is the only one that matters, how you are the centre of you own universe and everything else just happens around you. Right now, the minute I write this, I'm sitting in Heathrow Airport, waiting for my gate to be announced so I can get on my plane and go home to my family. I'm not alone in that; there are hundreds of people around me, each with their own gate and their own flight and their own destination. There is a woman sitting opposite me wearing all black with silver nail polish. She has short hair and glasses, and that is all I will ever know of her. I don't know her name, her age, wear she's going, what language she speaks, or anything beyond the fact that her suitcase is coordinated with her outfit. She could be going anywhere, to see people that I will never meet, who will live entire lives unaware of my existence. In my life, this woman is a background character. In hers, I am the same. Just someone in an airport, a face to forget. Right this second, right now, I am listening to Bohemian Rhapsody on Spotify. And nobody, literally no-one in this entire airport, knows that. Nobody here knows that I caught a bus from Brighton to Heathrow at 5.30 this morning and that since then I have listened to Wanna Be by the Spice Girls three times. No-one knows that at this second Bohemian Rhapsody has ended and Your Song has begun, and that I'm now imagining singing this song with Elton John on an all-white set accompanied by a full orchestra and backed by a child choir. These aren't exactly huge secrets, I grant you, but they are a part of my life that none of the people around me are aware of. And they never will be. The woman opposite me has now left (she is going to Pisa, I checked. I didn't follow her or anything, the gate is behind me), and that's it. She has left my life. I will never see her again, and she will spend the rest of her days in blissful ignorance of the stranger at the airport in whom's life she played a small, if strange, part. There's a kind of beauty in it, I think. There are billions of lives on this planet, some completely intertwined , some barely touching, some destined to come together. There's a beauty in the thought that every decision you make creates encounters with people who made the same decisions, that your lives have come careening together, even if it's just for a second. There's a sort of magic in life, in the sheer variety of it, that fact that no two are or can ever be the same. Mine is just one. Just one life among an infinite number of others. Billions of people won't know who I am, or who I was, or who I will be. I'm a face on the street, a customer in a shop, a voice in the background. In a minute, I will pack up my laptop and move to my gate, and all these lives around me will continue, unaffected. I'm not upset about this. There's a kind of romance, really, in the thought that - unless there is some kind of cataclysmic apocalyptic event - life will continue, everywhere, forever. It may be kind of strange, but knowing
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Annie LilygreenA collection of ramblings about things that inspire me. Archives
September 2015
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