7. Traces Left In Clay

“ a person is a person through other persons ” – Ubuntu philosophy

During the moments where when I’m just casually walking the streets trying to get from a to b, when I am sat in a room silently filled with people are the moments where sonder hits the most. It is an obvious yet compelling concept to think about – of course every person on this earth has their own life, but to think deeper is to realise that every person faces complexities as vivid as yours.

One person could be experiencing the best day of their life, maybe they won the lottery, while at the exact same moment, someone else is facing their worst, maybe they received a terminal diagnosis they never saw coming. One woman becomes a mother for the first time, while a few rooms down, another mourns the loss of her child – life is given to someone, while another loses it.

You could speak to thousands of people in your lifetime, and none will share the exact same story. All those people you walk by on the street, you will never truly know what they carry. It’s beautiful in its own little way, how life is truly so vast that everything is happening all at once, and you don’t even know it – how everyone is shaped by things you’ll never witness.

But what if sonder can also apply to those closest to us?

We move through the world assuming we’ve mapped out the people closest to us. We know their coffee orders, their dating history, the last book they recommended – but these are surface level echoes, tidy exports of interior life – and interior life is rarely ever tidy. Our inquisitive nature is left often reserved for strangers and small talk.

Truth is, we all contain secret cities, hidden interiors, rooms within rooms – these depths stay tucked away, because no one simply thought to ask, because life moves fast – because it’s rare to feel truly listened to.

Funnily yet staringly enough, it’s often those closest to us that we stop being curious about. We fall into rhythms, into what we already know – hes the anxious one, she’s the advice giver, they’re the funny one – these roles we play so often we forget that they are merely just roles. Those closest to us become frozen in familiarity, their updates become unnoticed, and their edges dulled by memory. We stop noticing the slow tectonic shifts of their inner world. We relate to the last version of them we remember, not to the self still unfolding in real time

Cognitive neuroscience has a name for this compressing tendency – it is called the “Theory of Mind” – our ability to infer what others are thinking or feeling. It is essential for empathy, but also means we’re constantly guessing, often lazily. We stop updating our internal models, we relate not to the person in front of us, but to their fossilized outline – we replace curiosity with prediction.

But what if your closest friends still contain versions of themselves, you’ve never met? Versions of them that exist quietly, out of view, never for you to imagine – that gap between the person you thought you knew and the person besides you.

What’s extraordinary is that our brain wants to model other people – it devotes much of its resting state to doing just that. The default mode network, the part of your brain that activates when you’re not focused on a task, spends so much of its time simulating other minds: rehearsing conversations, empathizing, reflecting, we are wired to think in relation.

So, what happens when we take the shortcut of assumption? – we close off access to those rich simulations, and we lose touch with our own capacity for wonder.

When we as humans come to the realisation of sonder, we are surprised by its vastness, not because the vastness has always been there, but because of how partial our perception had been, how much we flatten people into a convenient coherence, into a shortcut, because we are a species that likes shortcuts, that prefers something easy over something heavy – it is easier, after all, to compress people into neat narratives that fit inside our mental maps.

But shortcuts don’t work when it comes to truly understanding someone. Clay doesn’t just shape itself into something – it needs the hands, the influence, the pressure, the guidance to take a form of something real, of something complex yet beautiful and meaningful. Without that, the clay stays the same – unshaped, unaware, stuck in a loop with no identity. You can’t skip steps when it comes to pottery, there are no shortcuts. People are like this too, shaped by factors and environments that we have no knowledge of no matter how much we think we do. What we assume may sometimes be half of the truth, but it is never the full truth.

It’s never about lack of depth, everyone has depth, it’s about lack of invitation – “if someone seems boring to you…it might be that you don’t know how to prompt them. You probably don’t know how much beauty lies hidden in the people around you” [Henrik Karlsson]. Actions speak louder than words, but words are actions, they land and rearrange. They build scaffolding for thought and memory – they reshape what becomes sayable, and in turn, what becomes thinkable. It is thew sole reason why a well- placed phrase can rewire your inner architecture, why a question can unlock a forgotten room, why a conversation can leave behind an invisible structure that you’ll forever keep returning to.

When we really listen, we do more than just hear and begin to regulate. Our attention transforms into a co-therapist, a kind of social nervous system. This is called “Co-regulation” in polyvagal theory – it is the way our bodies attune to one another’s tone of voice, facial expression and breath. When someone listens gently with curiosity, your vagus nerve responds, your stress lowers and your capacity to think more freely expands.

We don’t need to travel far to discover new worlds. Sometimes, they’re sitting across from us, sipping on the coffee order you’ve memorised, waiting to be seen again. Everybody in their lives is really waiting to for people to ask them questions – so then they can be truthful about who they are and how they became what they are,

Ask the questions that linger, open and reveals. Listen for the answer, the pause before it, the subtle shift in posture, the breath they take before something brave. Because every interaction is a quiet invitation to be more alive with each other, to be mid-bloom together, to see, and be changed by the seeing.

Vastness surrounds us, it is the sole reason for sonder, but it also surrounds us in the forms of those closest to us.