Setting Sun
Each day, everywhere in the world, the sun will set (extreme solstice points notwithstanding). Sometimes it’s visible, other times it’s hidden behind a thick blanket of overcast sky. On the motorway, outside your home, or at the beach. Often in places you’ll never return to.
The busyness of day-to-day life usually makes most of us forget this daily occurrence. Travelling allows permission to stop, and quite often provides the perfect canvas for the sun to project its palettes of reds, oranges, pinks and purples onto the most beautiful landscapes.
It becomes part of the daily rhythm around which all other activities revolve.
“Shall we eat before, during, or after?”
“Accompanying beer, or not?”
“Are you taking your camera?”
Sunset in Koh Kood
My favourite sunsets are, unsurprisingly, by the sea. The reflective glow, the ever-changing tones on the glistening water as the sun gets progressively lower.
In Sicily, sat on the balcony of an Airbnb in Ortigia, it felt theatrical. Swallows murmurating above in a large mass of black specks, a fishing boat crossing the sun on the water as it headed back to the harbour. A glass of zibibbo in one hand, a fork loaded with fresh fennel and sardines in the other.
A sun set in serenity. Ortigia, Sicily.
In Koh Kood, sunset arrives quietly, as beach revellers reluctantly filter off home, leaving the odd person to swim in the cooling sea. A group plays volleyball, seemingly unaware of the spectacle behind them. Others cradle an ice-cold Chang and look out to sea, hypnotised by the changing of the day.
Wherever you may be, sunsets don’t ask anything of you. They don’t care what you’re doing. There’s no judgement, no measure of your performance, no requirement that you have everything figured out. They simply come and go, reminding you that today is all but done.
Bang Bao beach, Koh Kood, Thailand.
And that’s somehow comforting. A reminder that endings can be gentle, even when your life is in transition.
The sun sets not as a conclusion or a performative display. Just as a pause. Tomorrow it rises once more, and we do it all again.
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The sun rises above the horizon, spilling gold across the sea and over the hundreds of pilgrims gathered at the Byron lighthouse. A middle-aged Italian man begins singing the opening lines of My Girl. Not an obvious soundtrack for a warm, cloud-free January morning, but a welcome one nonetheless.
Long before the sun appears around 6am, the streets of this small but famous New South Wales beach town are already alive. People of all ages run, walk, and cycle through the quiet roads. Being outdoors and connected to nature feels like a default setting here, something that comes up again and again, and one of the reasons Australia, and Byron Bay in particular, feels so appealing.