A moment of sonder

If I ever, one day, want to create characters for stories, I think I would try to remember all the snippets of conversations I had inadvertently overheard while waiting in a queue, or just passing someone, and I would write them down.

In London, England, I overheard a young woman, with a slight, maybe French, accent say, ‘Don’t be mean to me just because I am young!’ I was struck by this because it was something that seemed only possible to enter the head of someone who is not British. Maybe I am closeted by confirmation bias – I had never heard a similar comment in a British accent, yet I can’t help thinking that her upbringing included a reasoning that youth is no bar to intelligence or understanding; not a sense of entitlement, more an understanding that she was not fettered. She seemed to recognise that she lacked experience but that was all that was missing for her to instantly understand something that other people had heuristics for, or for British people in England just grew up knowing.

I had a French female friend who told me that while she was still learning English, she had put too much powder on her face, and so asked her new English boyfriend to ‘blow off’ on her face. (Blow off is English slang for farting). She said he looked really shocked, because he didn’t know her very well. As an invite to me to freely visit, she once told me to ‘just come in and pop’. I think she was attempting a euphemism though; sort of a ‘double entendre’. Let’s face it, the French know what a ‘double entendre’ is. I really liked her then, but just smiled, not really knowing that she liked me back; she told me later, just before she moved away from the area.

I was on the same bus as a young mother with a baby that incessantly cried. I didn’t mind; I just felt really sorry for her. Her look of concern and helplessness was so pitiful. I couldn’t help though because I had just had eye surgery and was blind in one eye on a moving bus. She didn’t know that the bus engine noise would be extremely loud for a new baby, and she didn’t know how to comfort her new baby. When I passed her to get off the bus, I noticed her melting face filled with gratitude for the three elderly women attending to her and her baby. To this day, she might think how wonderful the ladies were in quietening her child, but I suspect she should thank the driver for delivering us all to the bus station safely, and naturally switching the engine off.

Surrounded by people, I overheard a man of perhaps 30 years, say to himself, ‘I just want someone to talk to.’

As I passed someone queuing to get into a music gig, I overheard him say to his friend, ‘I wish I didn’t know so much.’ I think he had a high IQ and didn’t know what to do with it.

I overheard a woman in a supermarket in the summer of 2020 almost shout to a shop assistant that she has a breathing condition. She wasn’t wearing a mask (Covid 19 lockdown in the UK). I suspect her boyfriend was one of those people who think it is cool to have maximum agency over their lives despite how negatively it affects everyone else. I imagine that he knows he annoys people and that is his signal to himself that he is in control over his life.

I overheard two people about twenty feet apart in a residential road:

Exasperated, one said, ‘Why don’t you just come to me if there is a problem?’

The other called over his shoulder, ‘Because you have no respect for other people, and so you can’t understand a single word I say to you!’

I used to play a game with my children in the car. Later, I played the same game with some of my employees while we were travelling abroad. ‘What do you think that person there is thinking?’ I would point out, or earmark someone in our view, across the street at traffic lights or in a park we were passing. Usually, the answers were quite mundane. But, I would always offer something like, ‘At last it is raining so I can test this umbrella I bought from a trader in the Sahara desert’; or ‘This is the fifth time this month that someone has stolen my car!’ when someone was walking or cycling; or ‘If I sit on this bench long enough perhaps the Council will put a plaque on it as a memorial to me.’ If I saw someone dancing and looking down, I might say something like, ‘Oh no! I know where my son’s stick-insects are now!’ My children and employees never seemed to understand that there is much more going on in other people’s lives than is evident to onlookers. They had never experienced a moment of sonder, or ‘the feeling one has on realising that every other individual one sees has a life as full and real as one’s own, in which they are the central character and others, including oneself, have secondary or insignificant roles’. (Dictionary.com)

I would have been delighted if the people we were observing were playing the same game and had targeted us, pointing their fingers and laughing.

‘Sonder’ is also Afrikaans for ‘without’ from the Dutch word ‘zonder’.

In searching for the word ’sonder’ in a thesaurus, I came across the word ’spissitude’ which I think means ‘density’. I would definitely have a drunk character in a play say ‘spissitude’ rather than ‘density’.

My 1962 Roget’s Thesaurus does not have ‘sonder’ in the index.

My 1982 ‘Concise Oxford Dictionary’ does not have ‘sonder’.

The best definition I can get for ‘sonder’ is from the OED www.oed.com under ‘sonder-cloud’. I used my library card to log in, under ‘Institutional Access’.

‘Now historical and rare.

A cirrocumulus cloud.

1816 Cirrocumulus, or Sondercloud, i.e. cloud consisting of an aggregate of clouds asunder (from A.S. sond, Old Eng. a-sonder and sonder): the distinguishing marks of this cloud being that of separate orbs aggregated together, and the change to this cloud from others is a separation of continuity into particules.

(OED 2025, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/sonder-cloud_n?tab=meaning_and_use )

So, if we apply this wonderful definition of cirrocumulus sonder-cloud to people, we can have a ‘cloud’ of people casting a mottled shadow on the world. Shadows are not necessarily bad though, they provide shade from the searing sun, and contrast in an otherwise too brightly lit environment. Alternatively, we might like the idea of a lesser chance of sunburn. Because cirrocumulus clouds are so high up, we on Earth only detect a dimming of light and not distinct shadows. So, a ‘cloud’ of people are probably more portentous, than distinctly instrumental in changing an environment – more of a feeling at the back of one’s mind of a lesser quality of life in the present yet the reason is not immediately evident.

https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=852553&tag=sixth+sense (my blog on sixth sense and shadows)

Cirrocumulus clouds are those ones that look like lambs tails, or when there is about to be a change in weather, they might be seen when a sky is described as a ‘mackerel sky’.