Post type: Speculative essay
How sure am I?: Reasonably sure
This is a speculative essay about something I’ve been feeling for a long time. It’s intentionally messy and rambly because I don’t have a crystal clear articulation of what follows—what follows is rather the first draft. I’m using this essay to stake out a thinking space to continue exploring this topic in more depth later. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
This essay was republished here.
The Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich.
You have a good night’s sleep. You then wake up and, like a human on a mission, run to the toilet to finish the mission of unburdening your bowels. Then you head to the kitchen and brew three hot cups of filter coffee (only sociopaths have one cup of filter coffee) and head to the terrace. You pull out your chair, sit down with your steaming cup of coffee, and just stare idly into the distance with those still sleepy eyes.
The skies are cloudy, but it’s still a beautiful day. The sun occasionally peeks out and then hides behind the clouds like a South Indian actress playing peekaboo in a duet song. Before you grab your phone and start doom scrolling, you feel this strong urge to take in the day. So you close your eyes and try to listen to the noises, but it’s depressing.
All you hear is the sound of that one random bird making cooing noises. Even that is drowned out by the sounds of construction workers banging and grinding, the sweet sepulchral noise of traffic, the incessant honking of people who are in a hurry to go to the office to find synergies and circle back, and the shrill noises made by your neighbors’ barbaric children.
Nothing else.
You’re drowning in the ambient noises of modernity. There’s nothing else to be heard. There are no sweet sounds of silence. There is no cooing and cawing of birds or the rustling sounds of trees trying to prank the nesting birds or the silent whooshing sound of the morning breeze. All you hear is that one lonely bird trying desperately to sing a song to help you start your day in a good mood.
Wherever you look, people are tearing up the bowels of the earth to erect buildings—just stacking boxes after boxes. All you hear are construction noises. These boxes will be sold to people who leave their homes and move here in search of opportunity.
People in these boxes wake up in the morning to go to another box-shaped cubicle, get through the dreadful day doing things they hate, and come home to go through the motions of life—all to pay the bills and EMIs they’ve accumulated while moving between boxes.
All of this sounds depressing and tragic, doesn’t it?
What have we done to ourselves?
What are we still doing to ourselves?
This reflection was partly inspired by an article I read in the Indian Express—an interview with the legendary Ruskin Bond, the beloved writer who shaped the childhoods of many Indians. Tragically, I didn’t read Ruskin Bond when I was young, but I read one of his books very recently, at the ripe old age of 30, and it was delightful.
In the interview, he laments the loss of walking spaces in Mussoorie and Delhi because of the traffic. This has been something that’s been bothering me for a long time.
When I was a boy, I loved walking and cycling. But now, it doesn’t feel safe anymore. I used to walk all over the city when I lived in Delhi, even from Connaught Place to the Red Fort.
The traffic now makes walking difficult, both here in Mussoorie and in Delhi. It’s just the blare of car horns. You get used to it eventually, but I’d much rather hear birds, but unfortunately, the traffic and helicopters have scared them away.
You learn to live with it. Otherwise, I’d have to move to the next mountain and hope they don’t follow me there.
Life changes, but thankfully, some things remain: books to read and friends to talk to. Now and then, when one of the young people in the house takes me for a drive outside Mussoorie, I can go for a short walk, hear a few birds, and enjoy a bit of peace.
But right next to the house, it’s hard. Town life is slowly consuming the countryside, and it seems that’s just the way it is.
I’ve been in Bangalore for almost all my life. For the longest time, I had the luxury of going for long walks. Traffic was bearable in the first half of my life before becoming a succubus, sucking your life force.
I used to enjoy late-night walks after dinner. If I think about the traffic near the place I live, years ago it was reasonably okay even in the nights. There was a low probability of me getting hit by a drunk truck driver and dying on a night’s walk, but now the odds are infinitely higher. Going out for a walk of leisure is to gamble with death. It’s a daring act—walking!
It’s not just the loss of walking spaces that bothers me—it’s what is lost in the process. These long walks were perhaps the only way for me to process the full spectrum of what life had in store on any given day: the good and the bad.
Perhaps more importantly, it was the only space that allowed my brain to wander in peace, to time travel and go barging in through a hundred different portals, wander distant worlds, and still come back home on time and in one piece. There was no traffic in the mental world. But now, because there is traffic in the physical world, it has choked up the roads in my imaginary worlds.
My brain feels like a toilet after four friends have had chole bhature, vada pav, pav bhaji, Cheetos, Budweiser beer, and masala peanuts, respectively, and then unburdened themselves.
I’ve also been somewhat of a terrible writer for much of my life. All the reasonably decent things I’ve ever written have been byproducts of ideas that I got when I was either walking or sitting in peace on my terrace, or during those drives to work or the local coffee shop. The things I write about were ideas my brain conjured when it had a chance to wander.
But now, in the name of progress and modernity, all those spaces, all those opportunities to daydream and engage in reveries, are lost. We are flooded with ambient noises from all directions. We don’t have spaces to engage in quiet contemplation.
We are never alone.
There is always a screeching noise or relentless honking accompanying us like unwanted relatives constantly poking their noses into our business. Even when we are alone, we are never truly alone. There’s always a noise around us.
Can you hear it?
The other irony of our times is that all the spaces where we could contemplate—parks, lakes, quiet corners—have all been encroached upon, nay, stolen. The park where you used to go for a walk now probably has a useless government building or, worse yet, the land has been stolen by some unscrupulous local real estate developer. The lake where you used to take a stroll has probably been filled up and turned into a ghastly apartment complex.
Perhaps nothing captures the remarkable irony of our times better than the fact that we have to go to a coffee shop or some small hole-in-the-wall café to find quiet. That’s because not only have our private spaces been encroached upon, but the public spaces have as well. It’s a sad and sorry state of being.
Is this really the bargain we made when we moved from our beautiful homes and villages to the cities in search of economic opportunities?
Is this really worth it?
Are we even thinking about the price we are paying by being okay with losing these quiet contemplative spaces?
Isn’t this a tear in the fabric of what it means to be human?
If we are just going through the motions of life—waking up, traveling on horrendous roads filled with idiotic drivers, and then coming back home without a single moment to stand still—are we living?
In going through these zombie-like motions of life and not really having an opportunity to just sit back and let our minds wander, aren’t we choking ourselves?
Isn’t this price way too dear?
How many of us really sit and contemplate this price that we are paying?
If we lose this aspect of our humanity, can we really ever truly live a meaningful life?
Can we ever truly flourish if we let our physical and mental spaces be encroached upon by the screeching, screaming, and horrendous noises of modernity and progress?
Is this really worth the price?
Is this really progress?
What breaks my heart is I’ve had the enormous privilege of having spent large parts of my childhood in villages. Even to this day, some of my fondest memories are from these places and not really from the city I grew up in. If anything, Bangalore has become a spectacular shithole.
The heartbreaking thing is if I go to my terrace and just gaze into the distance, all I see is tiny boxes after boxes for miles and miles, all stacked on top of one another. In between all of them, you can see tiny trees poking their heads out, desperately gasping for breath as they are overpowered and attacked by other boxes around them. It’s just a dreadful scene to take in.
Home has always held somewhat of a special place in my imagination because for the longest time, I didn’t know what home was. The word holds significance that borders on the spiritual and religious, even though I’m agnostic.
Think about the act of being at home. It’s a safe space—your tiny corner that you have staked out for yourself in this universe. It is your universe. Your home protects you from rain and shine, a space that allows you to do the things you love, all the while safeguarding you from the hostile elements and the outside world. But today, most of our homes are just tiny cubicles, tiny boxes stacked on top of one another. There is no character, no beauty. They’re all the same. We’ve colonized our own spaces.
It’s not enough that our homes are safe spaces; we need safe spaces outside as well. But think about the act of going outside in a city today. Our neighborhoods are dirty and overflowing with filth and garbage. The roads are dilapidated and filled with noisy, polluting vehicles. The air is thick with pungent pollutants. The moment we set one foot outside our homes, all happiness is drained out of us. It’s like a dementor’s kiss.
We are profoundly social creatures that have an unbreakable bond, an agreement with nature to be at one with it. To be born is to enter into an agreement with nature, and the terms of this agreement are that nature will help you flourish and, in turn, you protect nature. It’s a sacred relationship.
Today, however, there is no nature. We kept hacking and hacking until we killed it. What we have left is human nature—that terrible, ugly and rapacious monster that lays waste to everything in its path.
To be outside in nature was supposed to be a salve. Nature was supposed to be a place where we heal our fractured and disjointed selves. It was a place to rejuvenate our very soul. Nature was a safe space that allowed us to think about all the things that mattered. It was a space that gave us the permission to contemplate what it is to live and what it is to live a meaningful life in quiet solitude.
But do we have it anymore?
As a result of all of this, we have become estranged from our real selves. We just live as plastic shells that are fractured and shattered, without any coherent sense of identity or wholeness. We are adrift. We are kites whose strings have been cut off.
Have you noticed?
What is depressing to me is that we seem to have passively accepted the current state of our spaces—these broken, fractured, shattered, disfigured, horrendous spaces—and we’re okay with it. We’ve become passive bystanders as our entire spaces—both physical and mental—are shattered, destroyed, and disfigured.
This is not good.
It increasingly seems to me that just fighting for our own homes and fighting for our own quiet contemplative spaces seems to be an act of heroic resistance. That is a sad commentary on the depressing state of things.
In lamenting about all these things, I don’t really have a good answer on what it means to resist and what it means to fight for our own quiet contemplative spaces. What I do know is that it seems abundantly clear to me that if we don’t start thinking about these things, not only will we have miserable lives, but the world that we bequeath to our children will be even more dreary and depressing.
Even simple things like walking on the streets happily will become mythical stories told to kids who won’t have safe spaces to step outside their doors.
But what seems abundantly clear in my own reflections about the sad state of our current times is that not a day goes by where I don’t think about having a quiet little space for me to dream away without having to worry about anything, without being disturbed by the brutal noises of modernity.
I’ve been thinking for quite some time about writing a manifesto on this quiet little rebellion. Because as someone who is very introverted and has a very inward-looking personality, what really bothers me is that I don’t really have a space to walk and contemplate. I don’t really have very quiet spaces where I can grab a good book and start time traveling mentally. I don’t really have a good space where I can write in peace. As someone who’s grown used to his own solitude, this haunts me.
There was a time I still fondly remember from my own childhood where I could freely go galloping around with friends, just exploring uncharted spaces—not just in my village, but to an extent, in Bangalore as well. I do not think I would have grown up to be the same person without that particular expression of childhood.
When I think about the world that my own nephew is growing up in, it seems absolutely devoid of character. It’s just sad and depressing, and I feel sad that he will never really have the characteristic childhood that I’ve had.
Of course, every person who has lamented about his own times engages in a certain nostalgia for an imagined past, but you can’t say that my lament is unfounded. The evidence is all around us. You just have to open your window and look outside at the dreary, horrendous state of proceedings in our urban spaces.
All our spaces look the same, are enveloped by the same noises, and have the same lack of beauty. They’re all the same. It’s just a sea of sameness. Everything is flattened. Meaning is stripped bare and thrown outside the world. Character is brutally assaulted. There is no beauty anymore. We are all random LEGO blocks living in LEGO block-like houses in LEGO block-like urban spaces, wholly stripped of our individuality and our characteristics. We are just people who’ve lost the very essence of what it is to be human.
In our desire for more urbanization, more efficiency, and more or more, we’ve disfigured our landscape. In this process, we’ve unspooled the bonds that tie us to one another. As the length and breadth of our buildings have grown, the strength of our bonds between our fellow people has not only weakened but has been cut off. We’ve lost our communities. “Community” today is a cute little word to describe a group that you create on a messaging app. That sense of togetherness and oneness we used to feel with our fellow humans is gone.
We’re all atomic units—individuals in a sea of individuals—disconnected from one another and disenchanted. We are disillusioned individuals going through life without connecting with other people or creating spaces to foster those connections. We have retreated into our cubicles and boxes and forgotten the people around us.
We no longer know who our neighbors are. We no longer knock on their doors for a cup of sugar. We no longer assemble with our neighbors and just engage in delightful banter like we used to do in the olden days. We no longer celebrate one another’s success and joys. We no longer do things socially in our own spaces or collective spaces. We are just individuals in a sea of individuals, strangers to each other. As random as all this seems, all of this adds to the spaces that allow contemplation.
In writing this, I blamed modernity and progress for this dreadful state, but on second thought, I think I’m wrong. We are really our own enemies. Progress and modernity are all metaphors for the choices that we, as people, collectively make. So there is no outward enemy for us to blame for this dreadful state of being. It’s all us. We’re all complicit. We have blood on our hands. Just like we killed God in the Enlightenment, we killed silence.
We are all murderers.
The death of contemplative spaces has muffled both our desire and ability to wander—both physically and mentally—to explore, to imagine, and to think. Our very ability to pay attention and to sense has been robbed from us, and we didn’t even notice that our mental and physical houses were burgled.
To drown out the voices outside, we’ve introduced new kinds of noises when we step outside our homes. We have our earphones blasting all sorts of things straight into our brains. We’ve replaced noise with noise.
The situation is so bad we no longer have an incentive to notice things outside our homes. We’ve just introduced new distractions in the form of phones, listening to music, podcasts, or some other random things we’re probably not even paying attention to.
I also realized I didn’t explain what I mean by contemplation. To me, it is the unforced, natural act of thought and is as natural as breathing. Philosophers and poets might carefully distinguish it from thinking, meditation, introspection, daydreaming, or reverie. But in this post, I use them interchangeably because in a loose sense, they all share a similar spirit: turning inward and outward and allowing the mind to wander freely.
Sometimes we consciously seek something by letting our imaginative faculties fly free like a bird. Other times, we are consciously trying to focus on something or in a particular direction by narrowing the gaze of our inner minds. Despite the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s advising us not to look inside because we will only find a lot of shit, I don’t know how we’ll be human without looking inward. It is easy to lionize the act of looking inside, and I am pretty sure there must be some downsides if one looks inward too much. Having said that, to live a life of throwing oneself outside to hide from our inner selves like Žižek exhorts us seems like a lesser life to me, at least.
To be human is to allow one’s senses to be constantly bombarded by stimulus and information. If one doesn’t look inward to process all this, how can one become a fully formed human being? Contemplation is not a solipsistic practice of thinking about oneself—it is also an act of growth. It is the act of nurturing one’s psyche and weeding one’s mental garden.
Contemplation allows us to imagine a more expansive vision of what it is to be human among other humans. It enlarges the meaning of humanity itself.
It seems to me that the act of looking outward and inward is a dialectical process that continues from one’s birth to one’s death. You do, you observe, you get feedback, you contemplate, you process, you do a new thing, and you get feedback—this continues in an endless loop till our last breath.
René Descartes didn’t say “I think, therefore I am” for nothing. I don’t know what the hell Žižek is saying, but a man who never looks inward will always be a stranger to himself.
While we lament the loss of public spaces and write eloquently about the tragedy of the commons, I don’t think nearly enough has been spoken about the loss of mental and contemplative spaces. That to me seems like an even greater tragedy of the commons.
To me, spaces are not some abstract entities that can only be described using the terms that physics uses. To me, we share a special kinship with our spaces. In that sense, it’s not unreasonable to think of them as living and breathing things. We are part of our spaces, and the spaces where we grow up and live are part of us. Without one, the other is incomplete, and together, both make each other whole. So to me, there is a deeper relationship between spaces because of their nourishing capabilities. Spaces, in a real sense, are family.
It was reading an article about the work of philosopher A.C. Grayling that I came across this beautiful quote. In a fabulous talk, Grayling said:
“Within ourselves, in the great universe of our minds, we are sovereign. You know that poem: ‘My mind to me a kingdom is, such perfect joy therein I find as far exceeds all earthly bliss that God or nature have assigned.’ You really are free in your thoughts, you really are free to live in the world of the mind. Those choices that really characterize you and really express who you are—those choices in the world of the mind will feed into the world of physical reality and make a difference to how you act there and how you relate to others there too.
So it is not impossible to be free, nor is it impossible to personalize the ‘we’ when we talk about ‘we’—to the ‘I,’ to who I am, to which something responds in each one of us individually to that first-person pronoun. That is the thing—the ‘I,’ the first person—which is responsible, which is free, which can make those choices and which therefore needs to reflect on this Socratic challenge: who is that ‘I’? What can it do and what can it be?
So that the life it lives can be something that it owns and which is good—good to live the good life. Not in the sense of the pious life or the party life, but the life that feels good to live because it has in it the direction and the satisfactions that make it feel that it is worth living.”
But without quiet contemplative spaces, do we know the universe in our minds?
No.
The loss of contemplative spaces has led to us being alienated from our own vast interiorities.
I don’t know which philosopher first spoke about alienation—Marx? But I think it’s a powerful metaphor to capture the pathetic state of our modern lives. We are not only alienated from ourselves but also from our spaces. This is a loop—the lack of spaces furthers our alienation, and our alienated selves further ignore the nurturing and revitalizing power of spaces. It reminds me of a New Yorker article I had read about the power of convalescence.
Yet research increasingly suggests that the Victorians had a point. Sleep empowers us to fight infection; good nutrition allows us to repair wounds; time in nature has been shown to lift moods, alleviate pain, and lower blood pressure. Companionship can reduce the lethality of disease. Even many antibiotics don’t kill bacteria; they simply inhibit bacterial growth while our immune systems do the rest. Perhaps we give medicine too much credit. “A doctor who sets out to ‘heal’ is in truth more like a gardener who sets out to ‘grow,’ ” Francis writes in his book about recovery. “Actually, nature does almost all of the work.”
Think about what convalescence at its heart was—it was a space where one could recover both physically and mentally and become whole again. These spaces were set in countrysides far away from urban centers, which at that point were filled with smog, smoke, dust, and all the refuse of the industrial revolution. It’s a similar state in the cities today. They’re filled with traffic, smog, dust, and noise, and they’ve just severed the links between quiet contemplative spaces and the wholeness of human experience.
We and our spaces share a symbiotic relationship. We nurture the spaces, and the spaces in turn nurture and nourish our ability to think and contemplate. They give us space to be ourselves, and this symbiotic relationship has been damaged today.
Think about the generosity of quiet spaces—both internal and external. They give us space to be ourselves, and I can’t think of a greater generosity than that. Spaces don’t judge, spaces don’t distract us, spaces don’t disturb us, and spaces don’t intrude on us. They just allow us to be us. They give us a launchpad from which our true human spirit can be enlarged and truly expand to its fullest and encompass all that makes us human. In that way, they are almost maternal.
I think the ideal space—it could be both public or private—should enlarge our visions and our ability to think, daydream, and contemplate. I think the best spaces are those that induce reveries in us. But today, what we have are instant spaces that fracture our attention and short-circuit our ability to daydream and contemplate. They’re splitting our attention and retarding our ability to engage in contemplative thoughts.
You know things are tragic when we are estranged from our own spaces and from our own selves.
Perhaps another important reason why we need quiet contemplative spaces is that we live in a world where our senses are constantly bombarded with stimulus and information. It’s a clichéd phrase, but we live in an age of information. That means we are swimming amidst raging tsunamis of information, and our primitive little brains can only handle so much.
It is not for nothing that people say that humans are navigating 21st-century complexity with Stone Age brains. It’s this stimulus-rich world that our poor little brains have to cope with day in and day out. Why shouldn’t we create a quiet little space where they can just process all that they have to go through and just float free and wander aimlessly like a fluffy cloud floating around in the sky?
Another way of saying this is that contemplation is to the brain what breathing is to the body. By depriving ourselves of contemplation, we are robbing our brains of their essential nourishment. Without pockets of stillness, without pockets of contemplation, can one truly process what happens in a single day, let alone a week or a month?
By constantly running on a treadmill, we’re constricting the flow of metaphorical oxygen to our brain and depriving it of a chance to process the full spectrum of what it is to be human.
It’s not an overstatement to say that contemplation is not only like breath—it’s like what sleep is to the body. It is a biological necessity. Without active contemplation, without the choice to contemplate, a large part of what it means to be human will be forever lost to us. I think this is how people end up with regrets on their deathbed.
It is often said that there is a crisis of attention and we’ve all become goldfish. I think part of this comes from the fact that we go through the motions of life without pausing even for a second to digest what we have consumed. It’s just a narrow one-way street. We let all the stimulus and information into our brains but don’t really give them time to just process it.
Taken to the extreme, this one-way action where our brains only take in but don’t get the time to process things can lead to breakdowns. When we have a quiet moment, all these things overwhelm us so much that one will inevitably be reduced to tears. I speak from experience when this happened last year, when I just kept relentlessly working and didn’t really have downtime. When I did get a chance to have some downtime, I was just overwhelmed with all sorts of feelings and emotions that I otherwise hadn’t given my poor little brain time to process and contextualize.
Byung-Chul Han was right when he said that we are all burnt-out husks of ourselves in his book, “Burnout Society.” Burnout is a symptom of, or rather in part stems from, the lack of quiet contemplative spaces. We’ve all become cogs in the machine. We’re all zombies going through the motions of life. We wake up. We do things that we hate to buy things that we don’t need and to impress people we don’t have, only to get some invisible validation or to be seen or to get attention from others.
Even a cursory search of philosophers who have lived, taught, and written about contemplation makes it abundantly clear why contemplation is such an important activity, at the heart of what it is to be human and to live a good life. Figures from Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kierkegaard, Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and many others have not just written about the need for contemplation and its various dimensions, but made it central to their teaching and way of life. The subtext of all of it is that it is an indispensable part of what it means to be human.
“On the whole, the longing for solitude is a sign that there still is spirit in a person and is the measure of what spirit there is. […] In antiquity as well as in the Middle Ages there was an awareness of this longing for solitude and a respect for what it means; whereas in the constant sociality of our day we shrink from solitude to the point (what a capital epigram!) that no use for it is known other than as a punishment for criminals.”
— Søren Kierkegaard
“Do not go outside, go back into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.”
— Augustine of Hippo
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
— Socrates
“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
— Aristotle
“Let the soul banish all that disturbs; and let the body that envelops it be still, and all the fretting of the body, and all that surrounds it; let earth and sea and air be still; and heaven itself. And then feel the Spirit streaming, pouring, rushing into you from all sides, while you are quiet in this Peace.”
“It is now time, leaving every object of sense far behind, to contemplate, by a certain ascent, a beauty of a much higher order; a beauty not visible to the corporeal eye, but alone manifest to the brighter eye of the soul, independent of all corporeal aid.”
— Plotinus
In fact, as British theologian Andrew Louth points out, the earliest universities were places of contemplation:
The medieval university was a place that made possible a life of thought, of contemplation. It emerged in the 12th century from the monastic and cathedral schools of the early Middle Ages where the purpose of learning was to allow monks to fulfil their vocation, which fundamentally meant to come to know God. Although knowledge of God might be useful in various ways, it was sought as an end in itself. Such knowledge was called contemplation, a kind of prayerful attention.
The evolution of the university took the pattern of learning that characterised monastic life – reading, meditation, prayer and contemplation – out of the immediate context of the monastery. But it did not fundamentally alter it. At its heart was the search for knowledge for its own sake. It was an exercise of freedom on the part of human beings, and the disciplines involved were to enable one to think freely and creatively. These were the liberal arts, or free arts, as opposed to the servile arts to which a man is bound if he has in mind a limited task.
While we’ve lost contemplative spaces in both public and private realms, I think if you take a look at today’s universities, contemplation is the last thing you’ll see there. We train an entire generation of people to memorize useless facts and appear for exams in the hopes of getting some sort of credential that signifies—or rather, prolongs the delusion that it signifies—status and intellectual capacity.
In the age of artificial intelligence, this no longer holds true, but nonetheless the delusion that university education still has status and signal value will persist, at least for a little more time, before artificial intelligence shatters that illusion violently and completely.
I hadn’t thought about the fact that even our educational systems, which are supposed to foster a culture of contemplation, teach critical thinking, and foster curiosity and wonder in students, have failed in that pursuit. Instead, education has become a business in the most grotesque sense of the word.
I also realized that in saying all this, what seems to have died is our innate curiosity. In a sense, curiosity is an orientation force that not only pushes us outside but also inside. It is a bridge between the interiority of our minds and the expansiveness of our universe. The loss of contemplation is also a loss of our innate impulse of curiosity.
To contemplate is to be a philosopher, and contemplation is poetry for the soul.
The loss of contemplative spaces is also not just spaces where one can engage in contemplation. It’s also the loss of spaces where one can sonder.
Meaning of Sonder:
The word “sonder” is a neologism, meaning it is a newly created word. It was coined by John Koenig for his online project, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
Sonder is defined as the profound realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, complete with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, and a hidden world of their own experiences and inner thoughts. It’s the moment you understand that every person you see has a story, a history, and an entire universe of their own existence, just as you do.
Essentially, it’s a feeling of empathy and perspective, recognizing the intricate and vast realities of the lives of others. — Google Gemini
To me, sondering is but one form of contemplation. Think about when was the last time you sondered as you walked on pavements and footpaths and thought about the rich interior life that other people must be living. We have no footpaths in the very first place.
The simple fact of the matter is our urban design, our societal constructs, and our economic systems are increasingly hostile to a contemplative life. The lack of contemplative spaces has rendered our inner worlds barren. We can only rewild them by contemplation, and this is the only way to let a million contemplative reveries bloom.
What the loss of these spaces is doing is killing our capacity for wonder, awe, and feeling a sense of reverence at our marvelous universe and existence.
Is this a life worth living?
If this is so, are we even alive?
Life is both good and cruel at the same time. It’s a rock-solid friend and a cruel mistress. One moment life is opening a door to a wonderful experience; in the other moment it punches us so hard in our gut that we fall to our knees. To deal with life, you can’t just forget that you’re living. You need a space where you process life—all the good, the bad, the joyful, the wondrous, the grief, the love, the loss, the scars, and the shadows cast on your life. You need spaces to contemplate the very act of living.
Are you really living when you no longer have that contemplative space?
Are you really whole?
A life without oneiric reveries is to me a shadow of a life well lived.
It is a plastic life.
To wander aimlessly in the great universe of our minds is our gift. Whether it is a curious accident due to a very particular assemblage of particles or due to the handiwork of an infinitely wise being is beside the point. But to not take advantage of that gift is to slap the creator in the face.
What’s perhaps more important is that contemplation is not an inherently individual act. It is also social and a civic act because to be a good human, a useful human to society, is to be a person to the fullest extent that one can be. A noncontemplative being can never truly be a useful member of society.
In a world that is used to more speed, and more speed with each passing day, to stand still is a revolutionary act.