The sunsets my friends couldn't have the privilege to admire

and for millions of sunsets cross our lives

I love watching sunsets. My friend's daughter drew a picture of the California orange sunset before she moved to New York to study. The girl told her mother that the magnificent hour at sunset was nowhere else alike.

Over the past five years, I have watched the sunset in places from Antofagasta in Chile, to the farm burning season in Laos, to the rainy season in Bali and Java, and many months in those years, I watched the sunset in southern California in my surfing seasons.

The sunset in California is different. This ripening orange color smears across the horizon as if the sun melts into the observers' eye cones. The beauty peaks when the sun glares its last sharp light before sinking into the ocean.

This bright orange is intense compared to the clear and soft orange sunset in Bali, the tired orange covered in farm and forest smoke in Laos, or the hazy and subdued orange from the mountainside in Java. In each spectrum of the day end, I could see how human lives circle around this routine of light change.

There was a time I stayed in the mining capital city of Chile, Antofagasta, where the sunset came by pouring layers of highlighted colors on the side of cone-shaped hills. The Atacama desert turned into a fluid-like flow of color layers, bright earth, dark red, dazzling gray, and thin strips of black.

But let's go back to California, where I am traveling. After the glorious moment, the horizon blends into soft layers of dark blue, hue, light yellow, orange, thick red, and blurred black. Until then, observers are frozen in a quiet moment of admiration.

The sunset's quiet significance also lies in the transformation rhythm, when humans can witness seconds of change until submerged into the night.

But why does the sunset come to this road trip writing?

Because yesterday I got a severe hit from my surfboard when the wave picked up suddenly and threw my board at me. And because of that, I couldn't surf in the afternoon, and I wandered around San Elijo to see the flowers and sunset. And this gentleman saw me watching the rabbit running down the bluff, and he asked me what I was doing.

After some brief conversation exchange, he launched into his life story of being a successful son of an Indian family and being blessed enough to buy a house here (most of the listing I saw in this small town is from 1.5 million to over how many million dollars as you imagine). And he showed me his Whatsapp group of his high school friends from India; I didn't know why, and then a group of his old colleagues and another group of his classmates from Harvard. And then he took a picture of this magnificent sunset and sent it to all those groups. He said he wanted everyone, even those living in a polluted city like Bangalore, to enjoy the sunset like he does, or his classmates in Harvard, maybe too busy to manage their firms, could see the sunset through his pictures; it was the generosity of nature, he concluded. I didn't remember how much he kept talking about this magnificent sunset and how lucky he was to have a property where he just needed to walk five minutes to see the sunset. I had this urge to tell him I paid nothing, and I was watching the same sunset right there so many times.

After taking a picture and sending it to those groups, he stood up, said goodbye, and left.

I wondered why people were so in a hurry to leave the sunset. It is the most glorious moment of light effects AFTER the sun actually leaves. Some people just wanted to have a picture to acknowledge their privilege of having a house five minutes from the sunset or to prove that they owned the most expensive capital in the world: the nature space. Some just parked the car for ten minutes, took many pictures, and drove away.

For that, I sat down on the benches that were left empty and waited for the spectrum that the light created. The glorious moment came just as quietly as when it went after that some minute. Its existence couldn't be fathomed by how many photos or videos. If people could quiet their minds down when watching the sun, if people didn't compete over the sunset like the real estate was priced over their positions of watching the sunset. If the intense orange sinking down the sea saw us, it might have seen us as tiny pieces of dust so far away.

We don't need so much meaning to watch the sunset. Just stare at it long enough.