I swallowed the last bite of my breakfast and stepped out of my apartment, my bag over my shoulder and a cell phone in my hand thinking about uncompleted tasks at work when I noticed the day.

It was cool for August, the sky was an unbounded sapphire and the light was crystalline. As I walked I was caressed by the cool air, and I found myself in a moment when unseen tumblers fell into place and the day opened before me in exquisite beauty. Everything was suspended in the light and the blue. Memories flooded back of other times when the light of a day came from places other than the sun. I recall a charmed spring when I sat at an open window my imagination wandering through Cather’s Nebraska grasslands or a time sitting on a boulder strewn Cape Ann beach watching the breakers as I fell in love.

At the same time the coolness of the air reminded me of the day’s passing, of the inevitability of winter and the moment’s too soon evaporation. And it is an exquisite reminder of my own mortality. This is all fleeting. I am both elated and sad and I can only reach out with my feelings toward something I may never full apprehend, my consciousness grasping at a nameless mystery before the light recedes into the silence and the dust.

I am moved to mourn as I feel the moment’s loveliness retreating from me. And I am presented with a choice: whether to suffer and futilely protest –and regret—the passing of the day, or to unclench and give the day its freedom allowing it to pass over me and through me in its momentary resplendence.

So I decide.

As I walk the light quickly changes and again I am only on a city sidewalk. I step in a puddle left by an over-zealous water-sprinkler. I nod to the morning smokers I pass every day outside the old-age home. I descend the stairs to the subway and I go to work.

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