The sun rises on a New Year…

Posted on 1 January, 2015

After last year’s disappointing ‘no show’ of the sun during our running group’s new tradition of Sunrise & Breakfast, there was some trepidation about repeating the experience this morning. Several in our group had had a difficult year.

What if the sun didn’t shine? Wouldn’t it be safer to stay tucked up in bed in case it didn’t?

What if it’s cloudy again and we ‘jinx’ourselves…

As a group we decided that’s no way to live. We can’t let fear (or superstition, in this case) win.

We can’t control the weather in the same way that we can’t control much of what’s going to happen in our lives in 2015. What matters isn’t the onslaught of external events—it’s who we’re standing beside when the clouds dim our sunlight. It’s how we respond, personally, when we’re battered by the inevitable bad weather that each of us endures in different ways and at different times.

So we set our alarms for 4.30am as we did last year. We climbed Red Hill again. The two in our group who had recently had surgery drove up and met us at the summit.

We popped champagne at the designated sunrise time according to the BOM …and nothing. It had happened again. Grey skies. Blandness…

Until a few minutes later, this happened:

This was no ordinary sunrise. It wasn’t a faultless, perfect, ‘in your face’display.

It was better than that. Its beauty was shaped by the clouds we’d seen as a threat. Clouds which parted in their own time to let gentle rays to fall to earth and touch our home town in a way they couldn’t have with a clear sky.

It was exquisite.

Back at breakfast afterwards, my sister and I received a New Year email from our dad:

“Your sunrise pic reminds me of the song from the 1928 operetta New Moon by Sigmund Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein: Softly as in a morning sunrise the light of love steals into a newborn day…“.

The light was stealing gently into our newborn year this morning. One which will have its overcast days and its storms and its brilliance.

Isn’t our job simply to show up courageously and do what we can, with what we have—with our friends beside us?

Happy new year. xxx