I was not doing well that summer. Work was a mess. I had also been giving my mother the silent treatment for three weeks over something small. Every day on my drive home, my mind kept spinning through all those messy things, unable to stop.
Late one evening at the end of July, my daughter dragged me to the lake. She needed to paint a sunset for a school assignment and wanted me to go with her. I didn’t really want to go. But seeing that she had already grabbed her drawing pad and colored pencils, I changed my shoes and walked out the door with her.
The lake was not big. A ten-minute drive from home. By the time we got there, the sun was still hanging pretty high, orange-yellow. My daughter found a rock to sit on and started drawing. I sat next to her, just looking at the surface of the water.
As the sun sank lower, its colors changed layer by layer — from orange-yellow to tangerine red, then to rose. The lake looked like a broken mirror, every piece of glass shimmering. In the distance, someone was walking a dog. The dog’s tail wagged back and forth in the sunset light, like a tiny silhouette.
I suddenly noticed that my shoulders had relaxed. The voices in my head were still there, but they had become faint-like a radio tuned to a distant station. You could hear them, but they weren’t loud anymore.
By the time my daughter finished her drawing, the sun had just sunk below the surface of the lake. Only a streak of deep purple light remained at the edge of the sky. She held up her drawing for me to see. It was crooked and clumsy. But that big circle did look something like a sunset. She said, “Does it look good?” I said, “It looks good.”
On the drive home, the car was very quiet. As I drove past the lake, now dark, I suddenly felt very peaceful inside — even though none of my problems had been solved.
It turns out that worries don’t always need to be solved. Sometimes, they just need a sunset to make them look smaller, and smaller, until they are small enough for you to carry.
