'Blue Sonder'

You Are Not Alone

The definition of Sonder goes like this:

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.

I am guessing that, with all this social distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, "other people" is starting to seem like an abstract idea. It's kind of getting that way with me. My friends are becoming voices down a phone line or messages on social media. It's a little daunting to think I won't be grabbing a bite to eat with my old buddies at our favourite haunts for at last 6 months, and god only knows if our favourite haunts would even be in business 6 months down the track.

The wider picture of course is that our ancestors survives the bubonic plague and other epidemics and pandemics. Even our grandparents and great grandparents survived the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919; although in writing that, it seems important that it did go on longer than a year with that particular pandemic. You take a moment to contemplate those lives and their losses, and their suffering and well, that's even more cause for sonder.

When I as working on this one, it didn't really occur to method I would be putting it out during a global pandemic. That is the nature of time. You only get to live the history that comes to you.
We were warned about a pandemic. We just didn't seem to factor it into our thinking, even with all the fiction that warned us of what it might be like in the 21st Century. This is not quite Bocaccio's Decameron or Albert Camus' plague, or even Love in the time of Cholera. It's more a prosaic confrontation with ethereality that toilet paper is valued more highly than most other things in the supermarket when it comes to our consumerist society.



Come join the fun at Spotify.