Year after year, decade after decade, we are given new inventions to make our lives "easier". Cars that do everything but totally drive themselves, and that will happen soon enough. Phones that fit in your ear or work through your car radio. Information on anything, anywhere, at anytime. Comforts that were a futuristic dream, even 25 years ago, are now common place in our society. Still, our lives are NOT more relaxed. If anything, we are busier and more stressed than ever.
We have just traded laborious work for stress, simplicity for complexity, appreciation for entitlement. We move from thing to thing at the speed of sound. Its all hustle and bustle from daylight till dark. We stampede through the day, all day... until we realize that the day is done. Its hard to stop and smell the roses when you're traveling at full gallop.
I guess that's why I welcome a quiet evening on my western facing porch. I love to watch the setting sun. I sit in my rocking chair and look off to the west. I feel the change in the air ; the drop in temperature, the brief quickening of the breeze. I love the look of the evening sky.
Silently, majestically, the sun bows to the horizon and beckons us to be still. In one last display of its power, the descending light catches the edges of each cloud and accents them in a fiery ring of gold and orange. As I watch it's decent, I am quiet, and I wait for the darkness to cloak me.
I take in a deep breath and exhale the weight of that days living. I come to rest. Tomorrow can't be seen yet, and at this moment in time I can prepare for what it may bring. The new days joys, the sorrows, the work or play, are all hidden behind the veil of the coming darkness.
Work is good if it is productive. It's work, after all, that makes us appreciate rest. Its noise that's makes us long for quiet. Noise, scurry, and business are a major part of most of our days on this planet. I just need to devote time to the more peaceable things in this natural life...
Like quietly absorbing the soft and golden, silent setting of the sun.
