Another Sunrise

Sunsets are open to all, but sunrises are personal

I love a good sunrise. To me, it’s completely different than a sunset well beyond the obvious ways. For one, you have to commit to being up pretty early to see it. Go ahead, admit it, you’ve probably passed up witnessing a beautiful sunrise, especially in the summertime, when it means rolling out of bed as early as four-thirty or five AM. Sunrises are a private affair for those intrepid souls determined enough to participate.

Sunsets, on the other hand, are public events, free and open to all. Everyone’s invited and it makes for a charming post-dinner stroll or evening outing, hand in hand with a loved one. In some locations, crowds famously gather to share in the brilliant splendor together and say goodbye to the day before eagerly awaiting whatever comes tomorrow.

If sunsets are the shared gawking over a masterpiece in a crowded museum, then sunrises are a deserted island overrun with abundant hidden beauty. Sunsets are an enormous group chat but sunrises are a silent, soul-nurturing meditation.

My life, like everyone’s I guess, is both a long journey and also a full circle.

And that’s where I found myself one weekend this summer, while visiting the idyllic island of Martha’s Vineyard. I sat on a balcony, a cup of coffee in one hand, overlooking the beach below and Nantucket Sound beyond that, waiting for the sun to rise up over another day. It was not yet 5:00 AM and my wife slept peacefully less than fifteen feet away inside the bedroom of our B&B. I’d only told her a few weeks earlier about my MSA diagnosis – a rare neurodegenerative disease with no current treatment or cure – and I couldn’t help but wonder absently if her sleep was thin and troubled. If her dreams were scattered and uncertain, laced with the same fears I’d been feeling. Or, could that new sun in front of me be a true metaphor for the rest of our lives together. A new day, a new beginning, a new hope.

One other lone person, another early riser who’d wandered out from another B&B somewhere, stood on the beach wrapped in a blanket watching in contemplative solitude. We gave each other a knowing glance and an embarrassed shrug, as if apologizing for interrupting each other’s privacy.

While waiting, I suddenly recalled this very same beach from my youth: a weekend visit with a college girlfriend. Then, as now, I had woken up early and found myself outside to watch the same sunrise along this same stretch of beach. I couldn’t help but feel an immediate connection to that younger, more eager version of myself, as if part of me had decided to stay behind knowing I’d eventually return one day. I considered other sunrises during my life that I’d crawled from the comforts of my bed to seek out.

My infant daughter who, while visiting family in Brooklyn one chilly October morning, couldn’t sleep and had me driving her around until we ended up at Coney Island, watching the sunrise. I remember waking our preteen kids in our Grand Canyon lodge at four-thirty to see the sun rise across the majestic South Rim. I remember sitting alone in the backyard of a rented villa in Crete, watching the sun lift itself above a large slash of stunning Mediterranean blue. And how many other times have I sat or stood watching and waiting for what might happen in the enormous promise of a new day to come?

Now, on the Vineyard, sipping coffee and reflecting on all of it, it was as if I could see all of those different versions of myself looking back. This one simple act of waking up early and stepping outside to watch the sun had left an indelible mark across my entire life and I was only realizing it now.

I saw my young twenty-something self, strong-shouldered and cocky, ready to devour all the countless possibilities that life offered. An age when dumb luck reigned and we maintained a hope that the roller coaster ride we were careening around on stayed on its tracks.

Looking out over the water, and back over time, I wondered how all these younger versions of me think I did.

I saw myself and my wife with new babies, cradling and singing and feeding my way to happy exhaustion. A quietly settled adult who’d finally figured out a few things, at least enough to lose that lingering fear of the dark unknown. But also aware that so many more bits of life would forever remain mysteries, and being okay with that. And now, watching this latest sunrise, I faced a new unknown that I couldn’t imagine just a year ago. A diagnosis that resets everything I see in front of me every day. How many future versions of me will there be? How many sunrises are left? Then another thought crept in. What’s the real reward for us all? Missing 100 sunrises or experiencing ten of them?

Looking out over the water, and back over time, I wondered how all these younger versions of me think I did. Now that I was contemplating my last chapter, had I done enough? Have I made the right decisions and taken the right paths? Have I chosen wisely when facing the countless forks in the road over my life that required decisions be made. The endless litany of yes’s and no’s to endless questions posed to me or asked by me. All of these decisions working together to somehow land me here, back on this very same beach where I’d started forty years earlier. Some dreams realized, some still being chased. Some long forgotten and some set free to find a home elsewhere.

My life, like everyone’s I guess, is both a long journey and also a full circle that somehow – a deft little trick I suppose – ends up right where I started. I wondered momentarily if that is some sort of failure or instead a grand accomplishment. Does landing in the same place mean we’ve gone nowhere? The answer to how I felt about it all was, like the sun, hiding just below the horizon. But I knew it was coming.

My wife let out a soft, cute-sounding sleep noise behind me and the sun finally lifted itself up over the water. I watched as the solitary man on the beach shifted his weight, as if deciding something, before turning around and heading back. Looking out over the water, I understood something that buoyed me. If it were possible to walk across the entire world, we’d end up right back in the same place. And boy, wouldn’t that be an accomplishment? Wouldn’t that be a life’s journey worth living and worth sharing?

So go ahead, I’m inviting you. Wake up early one day, grab some coffee, and catch that next sunrise. Maybe you’ll see what I saw. Or maybe you’ll see something even better.