Freewrite 1: Nothing Like a Sunset

 

Sunset. The Sun’s setting out my window. Earth is rotating. The transience of the sunset in the illusion. There’s an eternal circle painted around the Earth, and our part just happens to be passing through it.

The equinox was a week ago. The days are shorter than the nights now, but not really perceptibly so. The trees know, though. They’re giving up their chlorophyll. The green ebbs away, and the leaves blush red and gold.

Leaves, Sun, pine needles, birds, and above it all a clean blue and white sky. You can focus on these aspects and almost imagine nothing’s changed at all since the glaciers retreated all those turns of the Earth ago. Then you see the black of the pavement, the dirty scaly shapes of the roofs of the houses, the sprinkle-shiny reflections off the polished cars.

What do I feel looking at this scene? Is it ordinary or transcendent? My impulse is to call it both, simultaneously. Is that profound, or just another banality? I feel like I’m invoking something deep, drawing inward at the quantum nature of the dust that composes this universe, but maybe I’m just being wishy-washy, sitting on the fence, failing to make a commitment. The middle child again would rather sit out and mediate than take a stand on something.

Impulses. Simultaneity. Everything exists at once, like Warren Zevon said. Except not everything actually does exist. There’s the version of me, in this universe, born with this DNA, and the me now who’s descended from that zygote. There may be other versions. There may be infinite other versions, in an infinity of multiverse. But what to say of them? What if the answer to all the profound questions is so what?

Then I remember my child’s face, wet, specked with blood, his face touching oxygen for the first time. What was that? Was that profound or banal? It’s happened to a hundred billion other people over all these years. So if it happens a lot is it not profound? Then again my life, and the life of my wife, turned about this moment. Like a gravity turn, we went in one way, went out, accelerated another. Maybe every moment is like this, banal and profound all at once.

I hope some day I sound less like a freshman philosophy student. But I think I'm not that bad. I’m learning. It takes time, but I’m learning how to parse these moments in my life.