Sonder: the profound awareness that every person you encounter has experienced a lifetime of hope, fears, love, and heartaches that you’ll never know. Each moment of sonder is a reminder to appreciate how little we truly grasp about others’ lives. – Adam Grant’s definition of a word coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
Just when you think you know someone you find out something new
This past weekend, while raking leaves, my husband commented that this particular job always makes him feel like a grown-up. I did a double take over the tarp full of leaves that we were lugging to our back fence, and said, “What are you talking about?”
He told me a story about his neighbor, Mr. Mac, who was kind of his surrogate father. He loved watching Mr. Mac throw huge piles of leaves onto a sheet, toss that sheet over his shoulder, and march to the open field at the end of their street to dump them into piles that would become, over the winter, rich, black compost for neighborhood gardeners to use. He said he always wanted to be as strong as Mr. Mac looked as he carried those leaves.
My marriage is a decade older than I was when I met my husband, which is to say that I’ve known him for a long time. Like – a really long time. You’d think I’d know everything there is to know about the man. I fall into that trap more often than I ought to.
Mind the gaps
Because all the stories I’ve heard over the years form a pretty clear picture of my husband’s childhood, I feel safe filling in the gaps with assumptions and imaginings. But filling in the gaps creates a static and flat portrait that is dim in comparison to moments like this one where I receive another precious glimpse of how my husband’s boyhood made him into the man he is today.
As unfathomable as it can seem in such an established relationship, it is still possible for him to surprise me; there are still stories I haven’t heard. I love this for us. I love that maybe we will always be learning about each other – what we’ve experienced, what we’re feeling, what we believe. I love that we will never not have moments of sonder.
Not knowing that you don’t know can be more upsetting than not knowing itself
What I don’t love is how my mental habit or shortcut of blithely filling in the gaps of what I actually know with what I think I know can create potholes in the “roads” of my relationships. I don’t love how often “not knowing yet” can lead to misunderstandings. When we don’t have the time or the patience to wonder about why someone has done or said what they’ve done or said, we can get reactive. “Why would he deliberately enrage me?” “Why would she say something so hurtful?” “Why are they not happy for me?”
Misunderstanding causes a lot of our suffering as humans
The upset we feel in moments like this isn’t fun – for either the misunderstood or the “misunderstander.” In fact, misunderstanding is actually the foundational cause of human suffering (or, to use less dramatic language, upset) in yoga philosophy. Its Sanskrit name is avidya and whenever you are talking with someone and start to feel flustered, confused, angry, hurt, or like banging your head against a wall, you can bet that you are experiencing some degree of avidya.
Knowing that there is more for us to learn, however, can be a bit of a superpower
When I teach about avidya, my students often seem surprised when I tell them that knowing that they are probably misunderstanding can be a good thing. After all, they are students, and their job is (and has been for their whole lives) to understand and know things. Therefore, embracing the reality that they (like all the rest of us) spend most of their lives misunderstanding can be a challenge. But it’s true.
Why? Because knowing that we do not know keeps us in learning mode. It keeps us curious, open, and wondering. It keeps us in a creative frame of mind, where we’re looking to absorb new perspectives and positions and are open to integrating them with our own. This is a fabulous way to approach every single conversation we have. When we’re in this frame of mind, we learn from everyone we meet. We are more interested, and therefore life is more interesting.
Let me restate that. It’s only when we don’t know that we don’t know – when we’re certain that we have the whole story – that we suffer or get upset from avidya. When we are certain that there is something about our situation that we probably do not understand, avidya is transformed into a blessing.
What if we embraced our tendency to misunderstand as a way of living?
The fact that I can have a moment of sonder while doing the most mundane of seasonal tasks with the person I’ve done this same task with for … well for a long, long time, means it is absolutely possible for me to have moments of sonder with everyone else on the planet. In fact, it is imperative that you and I do so as often as possible – for both the quality of each interaction that we have and also for the quality of our own life experiences!
So maybe you and I can promise each other to do exactly what I suggest to my students that they do? Let’s make a pact to try to remember that 99.9% of the time we simply do not know the whole story and that it is likely that we are filling in many gaps. Let’s try to remember that the same is true of everyone else. If we do this, we will increase the likelihood that we will experience moments of sonder. If we do this, our days will be filled with learning and getting to know one another better, which is one of the most rewarding and exciting parts of life.
In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali introduces avidya and expands on his explanation of what it is and the upset it causes in the third and fourth verses of chapter two (YS 2.3-4).