The experience of sonder, they say, is “The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passed in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own, which they are constantly living despite one’s personal lack of awareness of it.” It’s the classic word of nascent existential crises, the central graphic of pseudo-intellectual thirteen year olds clawing for attention.
I can’t remember my first experience of sonder- if I were a better writer, perhaps, I would wax lyrical about a pond or a park or a public school hallway, wrapped in the smell of stale gum and my frankly horribly socialized youth.
What I do remember is a late night, an old kitchen table, and the story of a man with a canoe.
This man, you recounted, was once a boy, and this boy was charismatic. Popular, as much as an impoverished peasant in mid-cultural revolution China could be, and you were a boy too and you knew him, knew him well, and knew him to be charming and deft and kind. You said you admired him.
Thirty years later, you met him again in a formerly-rural China developed at reckless speed. and this man owned a rickety boat and a minuscule transport business, and he said he admired you.
Being nine and frankly a certifiable idiot, the impact of this story was lost mostly to intense schadenfreude. Sucks for that guy, good thing I’m too smart to ever be unsuccessful, I thought.
(Preteens are all sociopaths. Such is the way of things.)
But it isn’t the story itself that stuck with me all these years, it’s the way you told it- even after life had shaken out and if we were to be so base as to pick winners and losers, you would soundly hold the trophy- you were sad. If only we’d grown up different- if only there were opportunities for salesmen and CEOs and middle managers in rural China instead of a narrow filter, eking out only the most specific caricature of engineer in which you happened to fit- you knew him as great and know him as great, and what you mourned for was the missed opportunity because you never stopped respecting him and felt his experience.
In today’s political climate, there’s a lot of talk about privilege. Once I got over the reflexive denial of teens striving for victimhood I think I had to come to terms with what made me who I am- a stable home life, educational opportunities, but most importantly- empathy and self awareness. Even before I knew of sonder as a concept or word, you always had that innate kindness, that understanding of the human experience and ability to put yourself in the shoes of another. Of all the advantages I did or didn’t have, having you as my father was the greatest one.
Happy Birthday, dad. Have a good one.
