about moments...

There’s something comforting about how the daylight fades here.  It’s easy to notice those evenings when the sun burns out in flames of glory at the day’s end, but here, lately, there’s been no glory.  The sun gets lower, and lower, and casually sinks behind the clouds that hover along the mountains like my dad used to sink into his rocking chair while the History Channel droned on in the back of his mind.  From one horizon to another the light fades from orange to pale grey, blue and violet, and it would be hard to even say when the day has finally ended.  When is it really dark?  Does it happen at 5:45 when the orb of the sun no longer lingers in plain view?  Is it 6:20 when the heavens are the violet pastel of a Monet masterpiece and you can just make out the jungle on the far side of the pastures?  Is it 7:00 when the stars peek out and the lights come on around campus?  Does it even matter?  For me, the best part of day’s end is when I’m walking from my office to the cafeteria, when I’ve finished my classes (usually), and the world feels stuck between day and night, caught in a twilight that refuses to relinquish one to the other.  It’s a perpetual in-between moment, an in-between moment that isn’t actually in-between anything.  It exists without any other moments framing it.  It is a moment that denies its own moment-ness, even if only for the moment that it lasts. 

I love these sunsets for themselves, for just being what they are, but as I sit here writing about them, I wonder if there isn’t an interesting metaphor wrapped up in it all.  Isn’t it always the problem that our in-between moments in life are uncomfortable times of uncertainty, anxiety, even fear?  And doesn’t it always feel like those in-betweens will last forever?  But then you blink and magically, somehow, they’ve disappeared.  Just like the twilight, they feel as though they’ll never end, interminable moments separating one time from another.  Eventually, and only when you stop looking long enough to eat dinner from a plastic bowl while sitting at a plastic table, the twilight changes itself into a night sky powdered with brilliantly shining stars.  And now that I think about it, one of the strangest things about those in-between moments is that there’s nothing to mark their passage.  In the day we have the sun to remind us how time marches on, and at night the stars give their guiding light, but at dawn and dusk what is there?  Just the breeze, the smell of the jungle, and the promise that no moment can ever be anything more than what it is, instantaneous and immeasurable.