My Beautiful Window

My window is a palette of colors. Each evening the day exhales its last light slowly yet gorgeously: the hushed dusk surrendering to a hue of pink, pink deepening into violet, violet dissolving into indigo until the world is gathered into complete darkness. I sit in this moment alone knowing that this fleeting beauty is not irrelevant to the meaning of life, but a tangible glimpse at it. My computer lies open before me; its white glow soft at first, then sharpening as the last traces of the sun vanish, and I begin to write: sometimes a rough sketch of a philosophical argument, sometimes the first lines of a short story, often times only journals of random things during the day that prompted my thinking. Sometimes I may be working instead, yet the burden of work seems not so heavy when set against the backdrop of this grace. I put on music from my player, the only sound that permeates the room. At times I pause, allowing myself to drift wholly into it, permitting the music to carry my mind wherever it chooses to wander.

I undertake these acts without purpose or expectation, whether writing, working, or wandering, yet in this very freedom, I find purpose.

What began as a way to grasp the fading light of the sunset has become my ritual—an hour in which beauty, thought, and solitude converge. And that convergence has witnessed the whole of my intellectual journey, where each of my pursuits finds its place within the hushed evenings.

Since childhood, I have lived with a sense of purpose that often felt less chosen than inherited. Perhaps it was shaped by my parents’ elite professions, or by a family culture that valued utility, rarely lingering on philosophical questions. My focus has always been on the practical. Each morning begins the same way: my alarm interrupts my sleep, I rise, brush my teeth, make coffee. Breakfast is often sacrificed for some extra sleep. Then begins another day of pursuing what I call “goals”—a vague word I use for many things: learning something in class, to scoring well on an exam, to winning a tennis match, to perfecting a piano piece. My life has felt like an endless chain of goals pursued one after another, carried out mechanically, often without thought, almost without a sense of presence.

It would have been terrifying to imagine a life spent in that same mechanical rhythm, but last summer’s humanities program saved and transformed me. We read literature and philosophy. Until then, I had scarcely allowed myself the time to scrutinize such texts, nor to indulge in the depth of power and beauty they contained. The ideas within the texts changed me. I began to read differently, to take the same actions but with a new presence—as if the familiar world had been lit from within. I continued to read and wonder after the program had ended. And it was The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus that gave language to what I was only beginning to grasp. “Rising, street car, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday according to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the ‘why’ arises, and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.” In those lines I recognized myself, and the faint murmuring of that “why” and weariness.

It was then that the sunsets through my window began to reveal themselves differently. I have watched more than 2000 of them through my window, but one evening—though painted in the same fading pinks and violets as countless others—impressed itself upon me. I realized then that the sun rises and sets, inexorably, and that one day its colors would spill across the sky for the last time I would ever see them. Time, sorrowfully, never pauses, and this truth pressed itself into me with both weight and wonder. If every sunset brings us closer to the last, then why live as though time were infinite? Why pass it brainlessly, when it could be shaped into meaning? But I do not deny the value in pursuing goals. But I have learned to approach this pursuit differently. I still read, write, play sports, and chase goals, yet now I do so with greater presence, attentive to the rawness within each experience, alive for its beauty.