You only get so many.,,

I almost missed it today. I stayed up late last night, and I slept until 7:19. The sunrise was supposed to happen at 7:30. I put it in high gear. Grabbed some coffee, turned on the car, took the dog out, put on my coat and strong armed my baffled husband to come with me. We drove down to the end of our street to the community pavilion and we caught it just as the sun was starting to peek over the horizon across the valley. You don’t really want to do that. Because the lead up to the actual event is really so beautiful. The colors are so vivid and deep. It’s an amazing daily gift.

You only get so many sunrises. I did the math. If a person lived to be 90 years old, and they were somehow able to watch every single sunrise for their whole life they would get 32,850 sunrises. Then there are the overcast days where there is no visible sunrise. Hard to say how many of those we have. But just for optimism, let’s say a third of the days of the year are overcast. That would leave 21,900 possible sunrises in a 90 year life. But you can’t watch them all of course. There is all of that time in infancy and childhood when you are not in charge of your day. And then there is all of that time in mid life where you are getting kids out the door to school and getting yourself to work and … well… distracted to say the least. So I have missed my share of sunrises for sure. I have managed to catch some on vacation, or on some occasion when I needed to be up at the crack of dawn. And I have always loved it. I have some sweet memories of driving my son Isaac to high school and watching the sunrise on the road on the way.

But these days, I have no children in my home. And I am finally after 35 years, out of the work force. So I have, lately, been racing down to the brim of the earth to watch the sunrise when there is one. I play some music, drink my coffee, and stare into the eyes of God for the start of my day.

But I don’t have that many left. I’m 63. Using the math above and taking away 1/3 of them for cloudy days, and taking into account the number of days since my last birthday, I have 6478 possible sunrises left in my life. And I almost missed it today. Close call.