Words are my love

Noun. The realization 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. (Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)

The word sonder and it’s definition give me goosebumps because it feels like something other-worldly, so vague, so obscure, and yet so real. You know as soon as you read it that it is real, though you may never have considered it before.

Years ago I was at Disneyland with my 10-year-old granddaughter waiting in a long line among a crowd of un- doubtably hundreds of people, when I noticed that she looked deep in thought and even somewhat troubled. When I asked her what she was thinking, she said, “All of these people have a backstory.” I was fascinated by her observation. I didn’t know then that she was experiencing sonder. How could I have when this word was invented only ten or so years ago by John Koenig, the author of the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows?

Emophilia is the tendency to
fall in love quickly and often.
Psychologist Mark Travers says,
“Have you ever met someone for
the first time and thought
‘this could be my soulmate?’

“If you have noticed a pattern in
your relationships where you
dive head first in love you may be
showing signs of Emophilia.”
Mr. Travers goes on to say, “It is not
a fleeting feeling, but a strong
desire with a hyper fixation on love.”