On Perspectives: Musings on the Sunset

Originally published in April of 2011.


I rode the shuttle going home today.  In that tinted sardine van can, packed in with 18 other people, we travel the Skyway to Sucat—the fastest route there is.  It is during this time, when your right leg is going numb because your left butt cheek is sitting on nothing, when no one risks moving and bothering the silence and balance inside, that I either fall right to sleep or ponder the sights from the Skyway.

Today was a day for pondering.  I will not discount the possibility that having quite the attractive girl sitting to my immediate right might have helped keep me awake; She was last to board, and I got a good look before she entered.  While the rest were asleep in their chosen positions, she was staring out the window at the sunset; you could no longer see the sun, just the vast red portion of sky interrupted occasionally by some clouds.  No buildings were in the way; the Skyway took care of erasing them.  Many a hipster's photo looked like what I was seeing—a girl staring out the window at the sunset.  I had to take a photo, but that would be too embarrassing.  

Why does the sunset exude such melancholy?  Is it the just the color?  Maybe it’s the fact that you cannot stand “under” a sunset; it is always in the distance, almost disappearing, but not quite yet.  Maybe it’s the stark contrast to having a blazing sun hovering over our heads in midday.  Things are cooler and slower at dusk.  Work and school are done.  The heat is gone.

We are fooled.  The sunset is but a different view of the same star that rules the Philippine skies at noon.  It is the same unforgiving sun that can make plants dry up and shirts soak up.  We are fooled to believe that the sun changes at dusk.  Somewhere, in another part of the world, the sunset we passively watch is burning someone else’s back, prompting the wealthy to stay indoors and the homeless to suffer a little more.  The fair-skinned make their way to the beaches, while the others bring out their umbrellas and sunglasses.  We forget the power of the little red dot on the horizon.

Your sun can be a host of things.  It could be a hobby, or a vice.  It could be an attitude that you constantly justify to yourself.  It could be an ideology, a political stand, or an understanding of the purpose of life.  It could be a simple belief or perception of others.  It could be a behavior, yours or that of others.  Or, it could be a person in your life.

We must not mistake understanding the sunset for understanding the sun.  The sunset is, quite rightly, the sun through rose-colored glasses.  To truly understand your sun, view it from every possible angle.  As statistics teaches us: the larger your sample size, the closer your estimates will be to the actual value.  One observation cannot possibly predict the true relationship between two variables.  So, do not evaluate your sun from just your one lonesome perspective.  Do not fall for the sunset trap.

It would seem that I have been trying to make the point that the sunset gives the illusion of peace and solemnity, when in fact the sun is intolerable and ruthless.  Again, we must be careful with our judgments; for somewhere, to someone, the same sun is just rising and marking the beginning of a new day.