Reading from under a shaded little quiet corner
Sometime around last month, I finished reading a short and easy pick-me-up book entitled The Art of Simple Living: 100 Daily Practices from a Japanese Zen Monk for a Lifetime of Calm and Joy. The book contains anecdotes from a Zen monk about day to day practices we can adopt to be more grateful and content with our present life, and while not every idea or topic stuck to me, one of the pages entitled Seek Out The Sunset caught my attention.
The page describes a set of stairs in Japan known as “sunset steps” where people often go to watch the sunset and encourages the reader to find their own “sunset steps” wherever they are in the world, and more importantly - to take this simple moment and be grateful for making it through another day. In the recent weeks, stories of unfortunate illnesses and untimely deaths of friends near and far have often come up and I believe that it is only through being content and at peace with our daily life, that we can live without the fear of dying at a moment’s notice.
“The important thing is to be able to sit and gaze upon the sun as it sets. When evening falls, take a moment to look up at the sky. Feel gratitude for having made it through another day. This moment will warm your spirit.”
Over the past years, I realized that I had stopped paying attention to the time of the day as much, allowing days and hours to blend mindlessly into events one after the other, treating time as a constraint which I lived around. Perhaps there is nothing wrong with having a life lived as such, but looking back, I felt like I lost sight of many of the simpler pleasures in life and even lost sight of an old passions of mine - photography. I had missed the simple joys of setting time apart to take photos in the golden hours of the day and just watching and observing life from afar and capturing stories.
Thus, I decided to make a small little commitment to chase a few sunsets and sunrises across the week as quiet little reflective moments for myself or just to take my camera out for a spin, and found that these little sessions had an innately calming and gratifying effect on me.
It’s often easy to miss how quickly life moves day by day and on busy ones, I recall times when I barely saw the sun at all. For myself, being someone who is always excited about new ideas and what the future holds, I think the joys of being alive are often understated and that it would be a rather dull life deriving happiness only from future success. Having these ambitions are of course something I love, but they merely dictate the general direction in life I chose, and there is of course also no doubt that we all have to work hard to earn this future, but I feel that it is ever so important to live presently.
I hope that you enjoyed these photos I took (and my little reflection). I would highly recommend the book to anyone who feels discontented with their present life or really just about anyone as a potential source of inspiration. May you find your own happiness and have a great and meaningful year ahead.
