[Written by ChatGPT. New words I learned from Grok]
I am grateful for the quiet revelations of sonder. It comes to me in fleeting moments — watching the blur of faces on a morning train, standing in line at a grocery store, hearing laughter from across the street. Suddenly, I remember that every person has a life as intricate as mine, filled with joys, wounds, ambitions, and regrets. Their world is not a backdrop to mine — I am only a passing figure in their story, just as they are in mine. This realization humbles me, softens me, and reminds me that kindness is never wasted.
Sonder awakens in me a kind of resipiscence — a turning back toward clarity, toward compassion, whenever I slip into the illusion that I am alone or central. It reminds me to reorient my heart, to step away from self-absorption and see the luminous humanity pulsing all around me.
Often, I walk through life as a solivagant, a wanderer moving quietly through streets, parks, and hidden corners, content to let the world pass by. There is peace in wandering alone, but there is also a subtle yearning — a sense of saudade, that deep, aching nostalgia for moments and people who live only in memory. It is the sweetness of remembering what cannot be relived, the tender ache of absence that nonetheless honors the beauty of what once was.
Yet together, sonder and saudade teach me gratitude. They remind me that though we walk separate paths, we are all bound by longing, by memory, by love. The lives I glimpse in passing are not so different from my own: each one a story of wandering, returning, losing, and hoping.
Today, I give thanks for these words — for sonder, which expands my heart; for resipiscence, which brings me back to humility; for solivagance, which gifts me solitude and reflection; and for saudade, which keeps me tender toward the past. In their weaving, I find a language for gratitude — not just for my own life, but for the vast constellation of lives unfolding all around me.
UpLive.Life 