Sonder: the feeling one gets upon realizing that every other individual has a life as full and real as one’s own, in which they are the central character and others have secondary or insignificant roles.
I found myself on an airplane this past New Year’s Day, only four hours after learning that my grandmother had passed away. I was flying back to my hometown of Chicago following a great New Year’s celebration filled with happiness, joy and hope for the upcoming year.
Learning of her passing was a stark contrast to the emotional high I had been riding. I had been thoroughly enjoying a well-deserved winter break, spending time with family and close friends and was excitedly looking ahead to a semester in Barcelona. I was ready for 2026.
Then I got a text from my dad telling me that my grandmother had passed away, that he loved me and to give someone a hug. Four hours later, I was 30,000 feet in the air.
I spent pretty much the entire flight thinking about my grandmother and staring out the window. Whenever I visited her as a young kid, she always prepared a feast and made me eat because I was “too skinny.” She always called me “Dr. Benjamin Song” when she sent me birthday cards each year, hoping that I would one day become a doctor. She didn’t speak very much English, but that didn’t matter. She was my grandmother and I was her grandson.
During the second half of the flight, there was a sunset. It was one of the most beautiful sunsets I had ever seen. Deep orange bled into red, and colors I didn’t know the names of edged the sun. It was truly beautiful.
Naturally, I thought of it as a sign from my grandmother. I glanced around the plane to see if others were also looking at the sunset. The person next to me stared outside the window with a small smile and a relaxed face, no doubt thinking the sunset was a sign of hope that things would get better in the new year. A young couple holding hands in the row in front of me watched the sunset together, seeing it as a celebration of their newly found love. A small child behind me kept her head buried in her iPad, watching downloaded “Peppa Pig” videos.
We were all looking at the same sunset, but it meant something very different to each of us.
That realization unsettled me at first. I was surrounded by people, yet I felt completely alone. No one on that flight knew what I had just learned. No one knew why I had been staring out the window for hours. To them I was just another passenger flying home after the holidays. It was very isolating to realize that, at the end of the day, my feelings lived in my own mind and heart. No one could understand or feel the way I did.
But soon I began to see it differently. I realized that while my feelings were invisible to everyone on the flight, theirs were invisible to me. And that didn’t mean we were alone, but rather we were only humans.
We can never truly know what someone is carrying. And if that’s true, maybe kindness isn’t optional — maybe it’s necessary.
If something as life-altering as loss can sit quietly behind a neutral expression, then so can everything else. Someone could always be hiding something under the surface. The person next to you in class. The stranger in line at the coffee shop. The friend who seems distant.
We are all living lives as complex and full as the people sitting beside us. And most of it is invisible.
So the next time you step out of your room, remember that the person walking past you might be carrying something you cannot see.
You never know what a sunset means to someone.
Always,
Ben Rachel
