TRAVEL | WRITING PROMPT | SUNSETS
Chasing the Golden Hour
From here to eternity
The Challenged (July 8): What do you like about sunrises and/or sunsets?
I want to be a sunrise person.
I want to have a peaceful wake-up, fully rested, where I can ease into my day with meditation, a hot cup of tea, and a gorgeous sunrise.
Unfortunately, I am not a morning person. If I didn’t have a job, you would most likely find me burning the midnight oil, sleeping at sunrise, and waking up to the sunset. These days, any attempts to wake up before 9 a.m. I do so unwillingly, under duress, and usually with some ugly crying.
Unless it involves travel. Yes, that dreaded 6 a.m. flight. I may be a little moody, disoriented, and putting my underwear on backward, but deep down, I’ll still have that giddy excitement that comes with travel. And if I can catch a sunrise, even better.
Sunsets, on the other hand, are my domain.
The golden hour is when I’m most alive, at peak performance, buoyed by the end of the workday, social interactions, and the proximity to feeding time.
During my travels, whether by design or chance, I find myself near sunsets with the camera ready. I only attempt one or two photos, praying to the shutter gods for that perfect shot. Sometimes, I get it; sometimes, I don’t.
I limit myself to one or two shots because sunsets are fleeting, and I want to spend those fading moments watching the sunlight dance through the air to spill colors across our horizon. Will they be orange, red, or purple? Will the clouds plaster the sky like some electric kool-aid Rorschach test? You never know. You only know to wait and watch.
A sunset is nature’s reminder of the passage of time, so you take those few minutes to honor that.
I could wax poetic about how this is a lot like life: how we take our shots as they come, hope for the best, and wait to see what beauty unravels. This is true. And while life isn’t always that pretty, I know at the end of an incredibly shitty day, I can always look forward to a sunset.
What I also like about sunsets is that, even though no two are alike, they have a soothing familiarity. No matter what day it is, where I am, or how happy or sad I am, that sunset is a constant. It will always be there.
When I travel, I often find myself caught up in the excitement of the environment, the novelty of the culture, the food, the experiences, and trying to connect to all things simultaneously.
But a sunset resets me. It joins me back to nature and history, to everything that came before me and everything that will come next.
This is the same sun I saw ten years ago, last year, or last week, whether in Texas or in Greece. It’s the same sun my parents or great-grandparents saw 50 or 100 years ago.
A sunset reminds me of the eternal.
It’s a brief reminder, but it’s there every day, and I don’t want to miss it.
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