Around fifteen years ago, I had a realization. It didn’t pop into my consciousness instantly, but instead grew from an inkling into a full-fledged awareness. Years later, I learned that someone on the Internet had invented a word to define what I was experiencing.

sonder 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

It wasn’t as if I had been reared by wolves and then spent most of my life as a hermit. Like almost everyone, I was raised by my parents, played with my siblings, and made friends with schoolmates. Yet, in all that time, I never truly understood that every other person was like me. That they saw the world through their eyes just like I saw the world through mine. I now also realized that every person is part of a nearly infinite web of relationships, thoughts, and experiences that I would never know. As I trawled the aisles of the local hardware store looking for supplies to fix my kitchen drain, I was brushing past universes of human experience clothed in worn blue jeans and flannel.

It may seem silly, but I found it difficult to grasp this new perspective. Up to this point, I had spent my entire life with myself as the protagonist in my own drama. Now, I had to reckon with the fact that everyone else I had ever seen, and many more people that I had never seen, were living out their own complex existences completely independent of me. They might pass through the margins of my world while dealing with their own joys and sorrows, but in their world, I was a minor or even unseen actor. Like a child who had been twirled in a circle by his father for just a bit too long, I had been set down and was finding it nearly impossible to keep my feet.

The strange feeling lasted for a few weeks, but the realization slowly moved toward the back of my skull until it almost disappeared. It was as powerful as before, but now latent, waiting for the right time to emerge.

Our everyday lives often take on a mundanity that only occasionally wavers. Moments like a total solar eclipse or the birth of a child give us glimpses of the divine hand, but we often only see the world that Gerard Manley Hopkins says is “seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; and wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell.” But still, those occasional glimpses help us pull back the earthly veil and see the immortal world beyond.

In a singular moment several years ago, my feeling of sonder reemerged, but it had metamorphosed into something more beautiful. At that moment, I realized that it isn’t when people pass out of this world that they put on their immortal soul—they wear immortality from birth to beyond the grave. Our broken and marred bodies can easily obscure the eternal nature of our souls, but that doesn’t change the underlying reality of how we were created. With clearer eyes, I could now see the people around me as immortal beings wrapped in fleshly veils.

We encounter these veiled immortals every day. From the person you talk to in the checkout line at Walmart to the person in your church who often frustrates or annoys you, each one has nearly infinite value and will exist into eternity. How should this realization affect our interactions with other people? How should we live when we realize the true nature of those we see each day?