You’ve seen a sunset before.
You’ve seen artist interpretations of them. You’ve seen them on motivational posters, website backgrounds and end of year accounts. But when was the last time a beautiful sunset stopped you in your tracks and made you cry?
Have you ever cried at a sunset?
Has the amazing beauty and majesty of a golden sky, awash with the most unbelievable colours you’ve ever seen, made you feel so connected to something bigger than yourself and so emotional that tears couldn’t help but start making tracks down your face?
It’s a sad truth that certain things in life become so familiar to us that they lose their natural beauty and meaning. Human Doings have developed a de-sensitising mechanism to help them process the world and its’ myriad of inputs through their senses. However, particularly in the last 10 years, information overload has got to such an extent that our minds are a little bit fried.
We seemingly have no psychic energy left to sit back and appreciate the beauty and stillness that our world has to offer. Everybody seems to be knackered, and on ‘catch up’, never quite ‘getting there’. Because of this fast-paced life, the de-sensitizing mechanism is so fully operational that our world is no longer alive, but merely a means to an end on our journey to the bigger house, the better job, the next holiday….
The daily grind of our day-to-day lives takes full hold, and our ability to sit still and feel the connection we have to the world and its’ natural beauty is eroded by every commitment, deadline and problem we have.
Every sunset has the ability to be an ‘awakening experience’ (read Waking from Sleep by my favourite author Steve Taylor). A gift from nature that can serve to pull us out of our de-sensitized world. To help us sit back and marvel at our place in this wonderful universe.
Maybe 3 times a week my wife and I feel compelled to shout to each other to look at the sky on an evening. My wife often says ‘Do you think other people are stopping to look at this?’, and I always say ‘Some will be taking photos of it, some will be painting it, some will be looking at it, but sadly I think most people will be watching TV’.
