"Sonder"

During Lent for the last two years, I have received a daily email entitled "40 Acts of Kindness" from Stewardship, a UK charity that "makes giving easy, inspires greater generosity and strengthens Christian causes." Find out more about them on their website: www.stewardship.org.uk

Each of the 40 days of Lent, they send an inspirational message and several suggestions of acts of kindness that can be done to fulfill that message.

Today the message is "Beeline," and the acts include making a beeline to people you see today and striking up a conversation.

Below is the introduction to the suggestions.

The wonderful (if a little bleak) website Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows has an entry that bears quoting in full:

Sonder: n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own – populated with his own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness – an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Happy Sondering! Share your conversations with us!!!