A sunset can be a metaphor for putting your best efforts out every day, whether or not anyone else is around to appreciate it.

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I sat on that hillside as the sun slipped into the Pacific, with the lagoon far below in the foreground and Point Reyes jutting out into the ocean. Yellows and umbers and blacks and siennas. Beauty beyond measure. My heart was pounding even more than it had been on the hike up. Sheer joy. I looked around for another sentient being to share it all with. No one.

Oh, come on, surely there must be one other soul up here, one other speck of consciousness to help me drink in all that was before me. Not a soul.

My first thought was, “What a responsibility!” I went to work and captured every composition I could think of. Screamed “thank you” at the top of my lungs. Jumped and whooped with joy. Tried my best to do my part.

Finally, as the color faded, I put down my cameras and stared out to sea. At a time like this, it’s difficult to keep from anthropomorphizing the universe.

I thought, “You know, that sunset wasn’t waiting for me to show up! Nature would have put on this display whether anyone noticed or not.”

Sure, I know that on one level “that display” is just the earth spinning away from the sun, allowing its rays to refract through the atmosphere, turning clouds the color of fireworks. That’s what my head tells me, but that’s not what it feels like. It feels like a performance, a visual pageant, a spectacular light show that “someone” had been rehearsing for months, if not millennia.

I’m neither smart enough nor enlightened enough to know what the sunset really is, but the metaphor I have found in that setting ball has had a profound effect on my life.

Could I be like the sunset? Could I put out the very best I had every day without any regard to whether it was received or not?

The answer, unfortunately, is no. There’s almost always something that gets in the way of my being that open, that giving, that... beautiful. Yet every time I shoot another sunset, the question comes again: Could I be like that? And if not, why?

The sage Emmanuel says there’s only one choice in life: the choice between love and fear. Is it my fear that gets in the way? Fear that my best won’t be good enough? Fear that my best will be ridiculed? Perhaps the greater fear that my best might not even be noticed?

Come on, the sunset wasn’t waiting for my affirmation or applause. I could critique it all night, and the sun would still set again tomorrow.

Fear or love—my choice.

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