01. A Step Back to Reflect

Life is an Autobiography

Son·der

noun | [son-der]

The feeling when one realizes that every other individual one sees has a life as full and real as one’s self - a life in which the individual is the central character, and in which others, including oneself, have secondary, or even insignificant, roles.

There are moments in life that feel like the infamous, "page flip" — quiet shifts where one thing ends and another begins...occurring even if you don't realize it right away. We all live inside our own, unwritten autobiography, each day adding lines to the page. Most of the time, it may read quite ordinarily: the morning coffee, long day at work, and night out with friends. Were a stranger to read a page at random, they'd likely lose interest. Flip a few more pages, and perhaps a few patterns emerge, but I'd argue the stranger would still be awfully unaware of the whole story.

I often relate it to capturing a passerby in a single frame of their day — walking to the train, ordering a sandwich, sitting with an espresso in the mid-day sun. We can’t possibly know what that moment means to them — it's impossible to comprehend the significance. We miss the heartbreaks, the breakthroughs, the quiet triumphs, the loud regrets. These moments typically live in the margins, invisible to the casual observer -sometimes they receive the relevance of a sentence, a paragraph if you're unbelievably lucky.

And then there are the chapters, appearing sneakily at times — ordinary days that later form the spine of something larger. A season of joy. A stretch of pain. A strange in-between that you can’t yet name. These chapters don’t always announce themselves. Some end with ceremony. Others end mid-sentence. Sometimes, you wish they’d never end. Sometimes, you’re begging for the next one to start.

Yet still...the pages turn. It's the quiet miracle of it all. Chapters come and go, but they also make the book worth reading. They keep us curious, the keep us looking ahead — and sometimes, they bless us with something to look back on, and cherish.