A common question is to ask whether a person prefers the sunrise or the sunset.

While there is undeniable magic in beginnings, in the rare encounter of a sun rising, in its peaceful gradient strolling the sky, waking a creation from slumber, there is nothing quite as potent as a sun setting. There is something fascinating about endings that no beginning can ever match. Death holding a greater fascination, or perhaps obsession, than life ever has. To watch the sun’s painful struggle over the sky, exhausting all her arsenal of colour and shape to dramatically make us aware of her imminent surrender. As if to say “I was here. I was magnificent. In awe watch me perform my final war dance!”

What follows is darkness, uncertainty, a moment of peace as what was now were. Our minds certain of the coming of day, our eyes blindfolded for things past.

Watching the sun set in a fiery blaze outside of my train cabin I am persuaded by coincidence to think of endings. The most immediate one – the year’s. The panoramic lightshow slowly fading outside the window illuminate by contrast the peace with which the year meets its end. A year filled with fighting foes and tilting at windmills alike held in itself passions, pains and power outages worthy of an end, hardly fit for an intermezzo. Yet in sequence, like a quilt, the storm which raged the skies transformed what was suppose to be the mundane passing of time in to the fiery flames forged from endings. Now as the year comes to its end, it does so with an almost alarming absence of intensity.

Remaining is but for the year to leave with the peaceful gradient of a sun rising. A new dawn starting early.