Sunrise Or Sunset.


My fellow blogger and friend Chuck aka Shackman calls some of his sayings ‘Shackmanese’. This is an example of that. He did not provide an exclamation mark or a question mark at the end and has left fellow LBC writers to decide on how to approach the topic.

I have decided to oblige him by replacing the ‘or’ with ‘and’, just to try and rile him a bit.

When it is Sunrise time for Shackman, it is Sunset time for me in terms of actual daily events. Neither of us is in the Sunrise stage metaphorically any longer and so, I shall not dwelve on it and instead talk about the real ones in my life at this Sunset years of my life.

My home opens out in the front to the West and the two bedrooms at the rear have windows and a balcony opening out to the East. Sunrise cannot be seen from the bedrooms because of other buildings and trees at the back. Sunset however can be seen from our front verandah, but that is a pleasure that I can indulge in only in the winters as otherwise it will be too hot in the summers and it is usually overcast in the monsoons.

Every morning, I sit in our verandah facing the West first with my morning mug of tea and then for an hour of japa. It is a time when the sun rises from the rear of our home and starts to illumine the Western sky and some of the distant building facades. Very often the light reflects off some distant pane of glass. It is the time of slow coming to life in our neighbourhood with bird sounds, distant sounds of traffic and the occasional angry sound of a locomotive horn from the railway line a couple of kilo meters away from home.  The air is fresh and crisp. People walk, jog or just start leaving for work and other regulars like milkmen, newspaper delivery boys, breadwallah etc also ply.  By the time I get up, I am fully charged to face the rest of the day. I love the 75 minutes that I spend thus every morning in the verandah experiencing the sunrise, albeit not witnessing it directly.

Given the choice, I would like to see both the sunrise and the sunset every day,  but perforce have to be satisfied with the sunset in the winters. Indicative of the stage of my life too?

Shackman has suggested this topic for the weekly LBC blog posts. You can see what the other writers of the LBC have to say in their respective blogs.  Maria, Pravin, Ashok and Shackman.

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