The Awe of Sondering
Striving to See Everyone
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today’s topic zooms out to a macro view of life to appreciate the sheer number of different lives and experiences, then zooms back in to explore how little actually separates our worlds. It’s a great technique for gaining perspective, humility, and humanity while appreciating our diversity and uniqueness.
Last year, I flew into Los Angeles, California, coming in through the San Bernardino Valley from the east. As I passed over the sprawl of humanity, I was struck with awe at what we humans have created. It’s a thick network of communications, transportation, logistics, and people… millions and millions of people.
During the day, my brain flowed with images of regular people, living their lives, running mundane errands, each lost in their own thoughts, busy with their own lives, and planning their own futures.
At night, that same flight takes on a different dimension as the city lights up and headlights flow between systems like electrons. In fact, the city at night looks a lot like a circuit board, with its grid pattern, dark spots of massive warehouses, and the constant, unending flow of life.
It’s those lives that leave me in awe because, as I sit at the macro-level, separated by thousands of feet, I realize I’m looking at a snapshot that’s deeper than anything I can imagine at once. This is where I love the idea of Sondering:
Sondering: The profound realization that every random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, filled with their own stories, struggles, and history, even though they seem like background characters in your life.
As we encounter people in person, it’s often easy to see how they weave into your story, and they become part of the complexity of your existence. Online, it is less so, but they’re part of your world, and so, you accept them as part of your reality.
But the folks I’m flying over? They don’t know me, and I don’t know them, and each one of them has a life as complex as my own. There are authors, and innovators, and clerks, and mothers, fathers, lovers, haters… Every type and personality I could imagine exists down below, and very likely, none of them know I exist.
It’s awe-inspiring for me and quite humbling to consider that my place, as important as it is for my family and me, is inconsequential to any of them. They have their own lives, dreams, and ambitions, and they’ll succeed or fail, and it will have nothing to do with me.
I don’t matter in their lives because their lives are as vivid and complex as my own. It’s kind of incredible to think about how many people that involves not just over a city in California, but across the entire world!
Yet, the inverse is also true. My life is vivid and complex. I have my family and my children. My friends and my coworkers. I’m connected to 7,000 of you subscribers across 124 different countries. Each week, I get to share counterintuitive insights and weave together ideas across domains and disciplines.
And each of you has a uniquely vivid and complex life. You’ve got your own family, relationships, loves, fears, worries, celebrations, adventures, and successes. This last part is important to understand because we love to measure ourselves against each other without understanding that success is, and should be, defined differently, based on your unique situation.
What’s fun is realizing that we could pass each other on the street and never know it. I may have flown overhead on my travels, and you never looked up. We may only cross in the ether through these essays, yet a common thread runs through us in curiosity and lifelong learning.
But there’s an even more fascinating idea captured in the theory of Six degrees of separation, which postulates that any person on Earth can be connected to any other person through a chain of acquaintances with no more than five or six intermediaries.
Think about that! In the awe of Sondering, of realizing the complexity, beauty, and diversity of the lives around us, there’s the very real connection that we have with everyone. Or, at least, the proximity to collapse that perceived difference into our own social networks. This is the superpower of humanity in that we are social beings and would be better described as Homo Socialis (social man), not Homo Sapiens (wise man)
We can collapse those differences with a simple conversation on the airplane, even an unspoken exchange of understanding with a frustrated parent, a small nod of acknowledgment when someone makes space in an elevator. Something as simple as a little joke to break the ice on a conversation demonstrates that, however different we are, we are a few words away from converging our worlds into a larger network, even if it’s only a temporary connection.
Yet, never underestimate the power of those temporary connections because, as one serendipitous conversation I had with a woman on an airplane demonstrated, sometimes it’s the simplest of engagements that can have profound impacts on your life. In that case, a conversation bloomed and, for a moment, our vivid and unique lives crossed. I was able to connect many of the ideas we explore here, and she learned that we just have to let go of our boundaries sometimes to Ask for and Accept Help. This is the power of homo socialis.
Overall, I find sondering to be humbling and contextualizing for who I am in the world amongst everyone else. At the same time, I also find it empowering that we are so close through our social connections. We aren’t alone, and we are surrounded by others who have rich experiences we can learn from. I love that I get to share part of your world through these essays, and I value that connection immensely.
As I fly overhead, I wonder which of you readers is down there, what your lives are about. What mundane or exciting things are happening? What dreams and aspirations do you harbor? What food do you plan to cook? I love how that collapses the differences we have into a shared humanity through the awe of sondering.
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