I asked her what the most spectacular thing she had ever seen was.
She didn’t answer right away. Then she said: shooting stars above the Milky Way, standing in a redwood forest.
I sat with that. She had been small beneath the ancient trees and smaller still beneath the ancient light, and she didn’t disappear. She witnessed. Present enough to receive what was actually there. I filed it away like something I’d been given without deserving.
Then I told her what I’d been thinking about. What if you lived at that level of aperture all the time? Every stranger on the sidewalk carrying a whole interior universe behind their face. Every breath a small miracle of oxygen and blood and electrochemical fire. The cohesion of things — that anything holds together at all, that the world works, that morning comes — received not as background noise but as revelation.
No one could sustain that, I said. The mystics fall down. Job goes quiet. The disciples cover their eyes. There’s a mercy in our ordinary blindness. Full exposure to the truth of things would dissolve us.
But here’s what I’ve been sitting with: what if you didn’t need to sustain it by willpower? What if love and wonder, practiced long enough, became the speed you traveled at — and fear simply couldn’t board?
I’ve spent most of my life trying to manage fear. Outmaneuver it. Make deals with it. I got sober and learned to name it. I got honest and learned to feel it. Good work, all of it. Necessary. But there is something past management, and I caught a glimpse of it this morning.
It’s a train moving too fast for the boxcar wino to grab hold of. Fear reaches for the rail and the train is already gone. Not because fear was defeated. Because something else had too much momentum.
A life of love and awe, moving at full speed, doesn’t fight the ego. It just leaves it behind.
She taught me the word for seeing each stranger as a universe: sonder. She learned it somewhere and handed it to me like a gift, which is its own kind of miracle — that a word could travel to exactly the right person at exactly the right moment.
The train is moving. I want to be on it.