The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

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Great. So hello and welcome everyone. It's lovely to see you, lovely to be with you all.

So for today's practice, the topic I want to bring in is is common humanity.

Common humanity practicing with common humanity and there is a word it's a made up word but it's a

word that I love so I'll tell you a little bit about this word and its origins. So there's a book I heard of about maybe a couple

years ago and the name of the book is the dictionary of,

here we go, it's a dictionary of obscure sorrows

is the name of the book.

But basically what the book is, is this person, the author, I'm

forgetting their name now, it will come to me, has basically created words or put together words from different cultures and written these very poetic descriptions for these words, these mostly emotional words,

that as human beings we feel,

but we don't have words for.

So it's a very interesting dictionary, quote unquote dictionary of

made-up words and there's one word in there that I was particularly impacted by and the name and the word is sonder s-o-n-d-e-r sonder.

Now read the description for you and I'll put it in chat so that you have it in for reference so

sonder is this actually close your eyes and let the definition float over you or flow over you

so here it is.

Sonder, noun, the realization that each random passer-by 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 ant hill, 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.

I appreciate how poetic this is and this sense of how each passer-by, each person we see as a

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