Dear sunsets, 

You are universally visible and universally adored. You never fail to take my breath away as you turn the sky into a vibrant reminder that to be temporary is to be beautiful. 

And for that, I’m writing you this love letter. 

Yes, they’re cliche, but they’re beloved for a reason. It’s slightly arrogant of me to write my column on this topic; what do I have to say that the huge number of writers and artists that came before me didn’t? The answer is not much, but I want to join in the chorus. Sunsets fill me with delight, and I am perfectly happy to be one of the masses in that regard. 

I think sunsets are actually taken for granted. I know, that’s like saying ice cream or puppies are taken for granted. But sunsets are beauty in one of its purest forms. If a 5 -year-old were describing their fantasy, I think it would look like a sunset: There’s light reaching us from millions and millions of miles away, and it makes our air look like cotton candy!

Allowing yourself to fully enjoy a sunset, even though it’s cheesy, is an important act of joy. Sunsets are seen as cliche and silly because they are blatantly beautiful. Where’s the poetry in something that just hits you in the head with its beauty? But enjoying something simple and beautiful is one of the most human things you can do. The discrediting of joy and beauty is a crime, I say! Each time you shut down your joy, picture yourself as an old-timey burglar; maybe then you’ll think twice about your actions. 

The sunsets have been especially gorgeous recently; the sky starts to glow in that sweet spot right between school and homework, the clouds turning as golden as the leaves stubbornly clinging to the trees for just a few days longer. Fall is the boundary between summer and winter, just as sunsets are the boundary between night and day. There’s something so special about in-betweens – a no-mans-land where you can briefly taste duality. The best things in life are messy and bright and colorful, and can’t fit neatly into small boxes.

Part of what I love about sunsets, though, is that they’re not special. Sunsets happen every day, just like the clock says 2:35 p.m. once a day, every day. They are entirely ordinary and commonplace. And yet at the same time, they are so so special. The light will never strike in exactly the same way again, the clouds will never take the same form; time will march forward and take the gleaming sunbeams along with it.  Of course, every new moment is unique, but sunsets are even more so. They straddle the line between magic and mundane. 

Every evening recently, I’ve been receiving texts saying, “do you see the sky right now?” “go look at the sky omg”. It’s easy to forget that we all live under the same sky. Different houses, different cities, different countries – but the same sky.  My friends are miles away, and yet we are all connected by the warm colors above us; like we’re all inside a blanket fort with a colorful quilt pulled over our heads. The light softly filters through the quilt, and for a moment, everything feels far away. 

Sunlight is a free, abundant, and unruly resource – a controversial thing to be.  And sunsets have always been the same. They haven’t been changed by the destruction of forests, the development of cities, by the invention of the internet – it’s something humans can’t touch. We can only admire from afar, as if the sunbeams were a pride of lions; awe-inspiring but highly dangerous at shorter distances. We have absolutely no power over the sun; in fact, we are completely at its mercy (luckily, being at its mercy mostly means feeling warm.)

The sun has been worshiped for centuries, across many different cultures. We’ll never get tired of talking about it. Thousands of poems have been dedicated to sunsets, thousands of paintings, thousands of songs. Is something really cliche just because it is universally adored? I think that makes it all the more meaningful. Here’s something that is so wonderful that humans across all of time cannot help but profess their love for it in any way they can. There may be no such thing as an original thought, but aren’t shared thoughts all the more powerful? 

I see sunsets as a metaphor for the human condition: we are here for a very short time, and we glow and expand and change, and then the sun dips behind the mountains and that’s the end of that. The light only reaches so far, and we just need to enjoy it while it’s here. 

Just as  E. E. Cummings said: “If day has to become night, then this is a beautiful way.”

P.S. Read this excerpt from John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed for an extremely well written ode to sunsets. My favorite quote from it: “Do I believe in God? I believe around God. But all I really believe in is sunlight.”