The piece that interested me the most was the work titled The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead. When I first started reading, my attention was immediately drawn from the very first line, “I’m here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don’t know about you.” Whitehead is directly getting the readers engaged in a topic that we all have in common; being a part of New York City. I have lived my whole life in Dubai, and some time in Egypt, yet no city is similar to Manhattan. The idea that all these changes are made every day, or that we walk past certain people and never give them much thought, is just mind blowing. There was a concept that I once heard about how a person can walk up mountain and not realize how high they are until they look down from the very top. This is the exact idea that applies to this article. We never notice the changes made in our city until we look back and reminisce and we’ve missed, but by then it’s usually too late. Applying these ideas remind me of a term that almost describes this situation; sonder: 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.