Sonder

For me, the most striking part of sonder is its profoundness. The intensity, the depth, of the realisation.

The fact that it makes you gaze back upon your own life and contemplate its own vividness. How much love you feel for particular things. How much disdain for others. How overwhelming some of the challenges and obstacles feel. How euphoric the successes are. How deeply connected you are to your culture, family, friends, community, religion. How important your aspirations are and how central your values and beliefs feel.

Then, recognising that the magnitude of everything which makes you you is also experienced just as vividly and with just as much complexity as all eight billion people around the globe.

sketchingsonder, at its core, is the celebration of this ‘oneness’.

It prompts you to take some time every week and grapple with the phenomenon of sonder. To recognise that everyone is curated by a subjective environment  and exists in an intimate relationship with it. That everyone is flawed in different ways. That everyone stuffs up in different ways. That everyone attempts to understand themselves and others in different ways. That everyone experiences the world in different ways.

From the snapshots taken of the beautiful, enriched lives which are all simultaneously unfolding around the world to investigations of the nuanced environments defining the people we are usually all too prepared to label and sort away, this project urges you to take a second and sit with the profoundness of life.

To render, in your mind, a sketch of sonder.