Every now and again, no matter how happy you are with your life, you'll experience a short period of time where everything seems to go against you. We've all heard people say that they're having 'the day from hell', a 'bad week' or that 'they've been having a tough time lately'.
I have a lovely life, usually, and I often can't believe how lucky I am but the past couple of weeks have been rather stressful. We bought our first home a month ago (yay) but we've been having some difficulties with a nearby house being horrible neighbours, work has been incredibly busy and the upstairs flat had a slow leak which lasted almost a full two weeks and caused a lot of damage to our living room. The insurance policy was still in the name of the seller of both ours and the upstairs flat so we weren't able to get it sorted because calling in our own plumber would have invalidated the policy. The upshot is that we, along with the upstairs flat, have to pay hundreds of pounds to a plumber as well as the £300 policy excess but we will eventually be refunded the plumber's fee. Because of this I had to cancel a trip to Manchester for a birthday party as I simply didn't have the money. My reaction to stress is to eat so with all of this going on I'd put on a few pounds. It's fair to say I was feeling very sorry for myself. And then I got the news that an old friend had been murdered.
I won't say it put things into perspective because my mind doesn't work like that. I can't stand this totally bizarre notion that you're never allowed to moan or be upset about anything because someone somewhere has it worse than you. I do believe that you should pick who you moan to and be considerate when sounding off. I know how frustrating it was when I was on dialysis to hear friends complain about trivial things like breaking a nail or forgetting a tv show was on. But if on the basis that somebody out there is suffering more than you so you can't possibly be sad then surely by that reasoning you can never be happy because someone is no doubt in a better situation than you.
It did however make me think of a personal revelation I had several years ago and no doubt anyone reading this has had this thought at some stage too. One of my close friends had gone into labour at 3.30am and I drove her mum and sister to the hospital. I was on my way home at 5am and although the hospital was on the other side of town I saw barely any other cars on my entire journey. All I could think about was that everyone was asleep but my friend was having a baby. As the whole town appeared to sleep a new life was coming into the world and they had no idea it was happening. I had work that day and it seemed hilarious at the time that in 4 hours I would be at my desk which may as well have been a million miles away. I got to thinking about all the times I'd been doing the laundry or napping and what might have been happening at those exact moments all around the world. Births, deaths, marriages, wars, scientific breakthroughs, great sadness and great happiness. All things I would never know anything about. I'd thought about things like that before but it really hit me that time because I knew something so momentous was happening back at the hospital.
From then on I've looked at people differently. It's almost as though every person is in the starring role in a film about their life. They're the main character, the one that would be nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars. Their inner circle are the supporting cast and then there's a whole bunch of extras to set the scene. But they also are a supporting actor in the film about another persons life or an extra in the life of someone they pass at the supermarket. We are all at once at the same time both significant and insignificant. It's beautiful and somehow tragic too.
I've since found out that The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrow had a name for this and it's called "sonder". A definition:
The realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their 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.
While I had been going through some personal stresses my friend had been murdered. The tributes that flow in from all the people, whether supporting actors or extras, are like the end credits to the film of his life. Each of those people now have one less character in their own films. Once less friend, one less customer, one less person to walk past in the street. But somewhere, on the other side of the world perhaps, someone is in a state of excited awe that something so wonderful is happening to them right now in this very moment. And you will never know about it.
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