Dust

this is an older facebook note that i wrote on july 1, 2007. it remains as one of my absolute favorite pieces i've ever written, and i don't see that changing any time soon.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

I've always heard a crazy thing about why sunsets are so beautiful--it's because people and animals kick up a ton of dust and other junk and it all goes into the sky, and when the sunlight reflects it from the angle it does when it sets, it changes the way we perceive the light from the sun.

Isn't it crazy how the things we see as bothersome create something so beautiful at the end of the day? Our lives are filled with dust, the dead things in life that just fall away from us without notice. Sometimes the dust is from things we purposely pound out of things. Sometimes the dust is from something we don't want to see--someone's house being ripped apart by highway construction to make way for the merge of two small cities into a single large one.

Regardless, no one likes dust. It's annoying. We clean our homes, our cars, our offices to rid them of dust. And all for what? Where does it all go?

As the summer fades away, a lot of us are closing a chapter of our lives--the setting of the sun on the lives that we once knew. And now all of the dust that has risen out of my life has become clear, and in the last flickering moments of the day, it makes all that pain--all the dust that feel away so meaninglessly, the dust that fell away because of my own selfish desires, and the dust that fell from the desires of others--turn into something so beautiful that it can't even be captured with words.

This is only the beginning. There will be many more sunsets to come, and the sun will soon rise on another day in the story of my life. What will the next one bring? Will the sunset at the end of the next chapter be as beautiful as this one?

So next time you notice the dust falling away from a situation in your life, just think about the sunset. Without the dust, there would be no sunset.

Just like--for those of you that read my MySpace blog--the fairytale ending can't happen without something hindering the process. Where would Cinderella be without the stroke of midnight?

I'm just as guilty of complaining when something goes wrong in my life, but face it: if nothing went wrong, the sunset would be just as bright and overwhelming as the noon sun.

And nobody wants to see that at the end of a long, hard day.