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. - The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

You are the main character of your life. You have motivations, goals, ideas, beliefs, memories, experiences, friends, family, and Love. From your perspective, everyone is secondary characters or just plain extras in the story of your life. It's as if you were watching your life in a movie theater except the theater is empty and you're the only one watching it. Everyone else is just a character in your movie. You don't see them as people, only characters.

Just for a moment allow yourself to think about the fact that this applies to everyone equally. Everyone is sitting in their own empty movie theater watching their life play out on the big screen.  Everyone is their own main character in their own story. To everyone else, you are simply a character in their movie of their life. If we can allow ourselves to see this fact even if only for a moment, our empathy for others would flow even stronger. We would be a little more patient when someone is upset, we would be a little more understanding when someone doesn't make any sense. We would be more forgiving, having no idea what someone may be going through. 

Just because we might be living in a comedy, that doesn't mean that the person causing chaos isn't living in a tragedy. There are people who live in tragedies, we can see them all around us, they are the ones who are trying to hurt others. You don't hurt the other characters in your movie unless you're hurting yourself. When someone has that much pain, they try to give it away to lessen it. When we can only see them through our movie screen, we may laugh at them since we live in a comedy. That only makes the other persons tragedy even more real. If we are able to step outside our movie theater for a moment and step into their movie theater, we would see just how much pain and suffering that they have endured, and we would never laugh at someone "making a fool of themselves" ever again. Instead, we may actually listen to that person. 

What do we all want more than anything? What is human nature? We all want validation. We all want to have someone; anyone acknowledge our story. The issue arises when we all try to show each other our story while not being willing to listen to the other person's story. Let's give other people validation for their stories, we don't have to agree with their story, we don't have to believe it, we just have to listen and attempt to understand. By validating others, your story will feel validated as we are all intertwined in each other's movies of life.

There are roughly 8 billion humans watching the movie of their life at the time of this post. Your story is important to you and is vital to the universe. It is also only one story among 8 billion. Love and Peace!

This post is highly inspired from the book "The Fifth Agreement" by Don Miguel Ruiz. This is my own personal interpretation and does not necessarily reflect the author's views or perspective. I have nothing but the utmost respect for the author. If this topic interests you, feel free to check the book out. I highly recommend it!