Sun rise, sun set... does it at all matter?

I was once asked whether this drawing represents a rising or setting sun… I don’t the question was ever fully answered, however while walking home today I started thinking about it. Does there really need to be a difference? In our Western culture, we are bombarded by dualisms: black/white, good/bad, child/adult, etc. Using the sun as an example, a sunrise simultaneously leads to a sunset in a different locale, and of course a setting sun always follows a rising one, and vice versa. It got me thinking about our position amongst all this flux, of life’s changes and opportunities. Software programmer to volunteer in Nepal, or Vancouverite to Haligonian (trying hard to burn the CFA label), seemingly opposites in many ways, but perhaps unifying in a holistic sense as these experiences in part define our present identities.

Perhaps this is a tenuous and poorly articulated thought process, but the only way to reconcile such contradictions, it seems to me, is to achieve some measure of balance- the whole yin and yang phenomenon. The balance comes from living in the present. In this instantaneous state, it’s futile to ask whether the sun is rising or setting- it’s just there as its luminous self despite what has gone on in the past or what will subsequently happen. Perhaps this is what the Buddhists are trying to achieve, a state of mind where the past and the future define what is, but their exact details cease to matter, “now” is just what it is… the balance achieved by a single moment of time, infinitely complex and often overlooked by a tendency to determine “what will” or “what has”, but in a sense, our only true reality.