Have you ever sat at a red light where a stream of cars are driving by at an angle where you can see the people inside and wondered what the people may be thinking?  Or noticed a light on in a building in the distance and considered how the inhabitants may be feeling?  Everyone has their own unique experiences, their own personality. They’ve all loved, cried, been angry.  

All around us are individuals much like ourselves, yet also different and unique. They’ve all had things that make them laugh, dreams, sorrow, moments of happiness, and appreciations.  Many people passing you by on any given day could become close friends if you had the time to get to know them. 

The dictionary of obscure sorrows created a word called Sonder, which is defined as “the realization that everyone has a story.” Take a moment to watch the short video below.

“Sonder. You are the main character—the protagonist—the star at the center of your own unfolding story. You’re surrounded by your supporting cast: friends and family hanging in your immediate orbit. Scattered a little further out, a network of acquaintances who drift in and out of contact over the years. But there in the background, faint and out of focus, are the extras. The random passersby. Each living a life as vivid and complex as your own. They carry on invisibly around you, bearing the accumulated weight of their own ambitions, friends, routines, mistakes, worries, triumphs and inherited craziness. When your life moves on to the next scene, theirs flickers in place, wrapped in a cloud of backstory and inside jokes and characters strung together with countless other stories you’ll never be able to see. That you’ll never know exists. 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.”

Your life can go many directions, and every fork in the road leads to different people in your life, and thus different experiences that would shape you in different ways. Perhaps years ago had you gone made a different choice on where to go for lunch you might have met someone that changed who you are today.

Try this sometime, go out somewhere and spot a random person walking in the distance and imagine that you are them. You look different, feel different, have experience things in a different way. You know different people, have different ambitions, have different sorrows, experience everything in a different way. And then think about ways that you may feel similar, and have the same sort of feelings in various situations.

Now imagine they spot you out of the corner of their eye while going about their day and move on by paying no mind, the same way you normally do to most people that move through your own field of vision. Consider all of the things you’ve experience in your life that were significant to you, your personal story and what it means.

They go their way, you go yours.

You’ll probably never see each other again, or if you do, you won’t even know it. But in taking some time to consider this, you’ll better appreciate the importance of the unnamed people you encounter.

Things are going on all around us, molecules and microscopic interactions surround us, stars are in the sky, people are experiencing life. Things are meaningful.

Likewise, you’re emotions are uniquely yours, and your journey is one of a kind. Nobody else in the world experiences the world exactly as you do and nobody ever will again. Your own experiences are unique and because of this they are worthy of treasuring, and so are everyone else’s.

I live across from a small nature preserve full of tall old trees and a creek hidden somewhere between them. From my balcony I can see the whole trunks of the trees sway a little when gusts of wind come by, and the tops of the trees dance rhythmically to the wind that flows through. Sometimes the winds whip around the walls of where I live too making sharp whistling noises, and between me and the trees each blade of grass moves within the flow of the earth. Perhaps the wind is a writer, and it weaves like cursive letters and creates its story into the contours of each tree and each person it touches, all unique, telling a long story with each moment that we witness this moving force.

Cursive is a style of writing that I have not used in many years. Some time ago the public education system in the United States decided to stop teaching cursive to the children or to teach it only very minimally. It’s become outdated, they said, today is an era of information and technology. In this day in age it would be a waste to spend time teaching kids how to write the English language in a style that is no longer used in modern society. It is better to focus on practicality and other skills that are applicable to the workforce.

Perhaps they are right. It is true that cursive is no longer a skill that is needed in the world today, unless you are in a very niche profession it is very unlikely that you will be required to ever write a sentence in cursive all your life. From a practical standpoint it’s hard to argue that students should spend hours on it, and somewhat ironically the penmanship style of cursive was originally invented as a way to write faster and more efficiently. Yet while I can’t claim to write in cursive regularly myself (I probably could not write the fully alphabet in cursive correctly anymore), I can’t help but think that something is being lost by this removal of cursive from the education system. The cursive style of writing carries with it a beauty within its calligraphy. It makes information into art, thoughts into aesthetics.

I remember having some assignments back in school in which I had to write entire essays in cursive. It was challenging to do so but I also remember enjoying it, because there was a bit of art to it. Sitting with a paper and pencil drawing out the curves of each letter, creating the connections and letting a piece of creativity flow from within. I’d make some sentences a little wider than others, and some a bit sharper. I know intuitively even as a child that I was putting a part of myself into these sentences, and not just in what I was saying but also in the way it was being constructed. Imprints of my psychological nature were being expressed within language and through art at the same time. It created a sense of ownership with my writing and the conveyance of my thoughts.

And now we just type in letters on a keyboard, or a phone, or even just ask ChatGPT to do it for us. I’m no luddite, but part of me wonders if the efficiency that we’ve gained comes at a cost.

I have some old letters that my great grandfather wrote to his lover and future wife back in the 1890s. The sentences were expressive and resembled a kind of classical art, and such art resembles organic objects of beauty. It’s hard to imagine that our souls could be as engaged in writing a heart felt letter over a text message as one might be penning a letter in cursive. When writing by hand at times the shapes and angles reflect the feelings of the writing much better than an emoji ever could.

Compare this to writing done on a computer. Every letter is exactly the same, a standardized utilitarian backdrop used to write out our thoughts. It’s frowned upon to use different fonts while writing, and it is considered good form to keep everything uniform. It makes sense, too. It is the utilitarian answer to the complexities and confusions that might come from individualization of paper writing. And especially today, people’s handwriting is so bad that you could scarcely understand what people are trying to say if we were all exchanging paper everywhere.

A solution is a solution, and efficiency is efficiency. Yet, when I look out over the trees near my house, what draws my eyes to linger is nothing utilitarian or efficient, but something I draw from the outside in that makes me feel human. When I quiet my mind among places of natural beauty, I feel a continuity between a past long gone which flows through my veins and a harmony with something far greater than the civilization I live in.

It seems that it may not be coincidental that the loss of cursive coincided with the depopularization of classical art, literature, and architecture. Today, the art world seems to value performative spectacle over careful representations of beauty. Postmodern literature values a crash, gritty realism over abstract romanticism. Big strip malls and neon signs have replaced the classical buildings and etchings in stones seem in old downtowns, and large towers of glass now conceal the artistic design of older architectural structures.

I’m not saying it’s bad. All efficiency has purpose, but it is worthwhile to ask ourselves this question and whether or not it’s really worthwhile. Uniformity creates simplicity, while individuality creates complexity.

Despite the machine like nature we often create society to function as, we are all still humans and inherently social creatures of emotions. And perhaps on some level the idea behind all of this efficiency is to expedite the path towards meaningful connections with others. Because, despite all of the efficiency and uniformity, this sameness will never do away with the individualism of people around us. This is a blessing. We all have unique shades to our personality, and are all on a special journey through life that is all of our own. People are always changing in subtle ways, stretching and contracting aspects of self in reaction to the every moving nature of life. The valves of our voices are all a little different, and when we laugh with one another our senses of humor are interwoven within frameworks that are all our own. This individuality is anything but efficient, it is what makes relationships difficult, but it is also what makes it all worthwhile. We fall in love with differences, because much in the same way as the cursive winds circle the trees, so does the cursive of our hearts wind through relationships and imprints a story in our soul.

We have all experienced at various times in our life what can be called peak experiences, times of brief transcendental quality that flows through us making us feel truly alive. They may last for a while, or sometimes they are very fleeting. Sometimes these moments occur after going through something difficult and reaching the end you experience a sense of euphoria, while other times you may capture upon such a moment unexpectedly, and a moment of clarity and cool energy runs through you like the sound of the wind moving through a group of large tree branches.  Or perhaps it is a clear thought during a moment of morning solitude, a sensation while driving home, or something felt at a party. 

It’s moments like this when life is the most real, and even if it only lasts for seconds, we feel a reverberation that lingers inside for a duration of time.  They leave an impression within us and they remain etched in our memories, carried about in the secret lakes of our soul from year to year. 

We may soon be unable to recollect the exact moment when these feelings came to us, but they are in us as feelings that our hearts reference them without our knowing.  They link together like a golden chain forming bonds of meaning that we go back to, and such experiences add colors and shades to our personalities and our subtle experiences of the world. Like echoes they bounce and shimmer through our sleeping dream and inform the trajectory of spirit. They are the high points of our life story and link together like a golden chain.

It’s useful to think back over our life and recall the links that form our own golden chain and think of how it may have shaped the way we think about things today. Perhaps in doing so, we can learn something valuable about ourselves.