"Golden Days Before They End"

Learning and accepting, these are the chief accomplishments of this journey.  Obedience too: this is a quality we are often unaware that we possess.  We practice it nearly every moment of our existences.  The laws of gravity, the seemingly unceasing beating of our hearts, breathing in and out, holding our peace for most slights, defects of circumstance, tools, objects, those around us and inadequacies of every imaginable variety: all these we usually refrain from not accepting and instead obey the silent admonition that reminds us to bear reality, while our sensitivities may often cry out for revolution.  It would be far too exhausting to express objections to every pinprick of the omnipresent malaise of imperfection.  Maturity helps this process along and the more creative among us can focus on little niches that we endeavor to make our own personal fiefdoms of mastery, whether it's a job well done, a room thoroughly cleaned, a car repaired, a poem, painting or even a business report or budget plan crafted to a level of excellence that deeply satisfies with its gleaming artistry or mathematical precision rendered after great labor.

But learning and accepting limitations, these may be among the greatest treasures of a man or woman's secret trove.  I do not allude to a thinly veiled surrender or a fearfulness and a moral cowardice masquerading as philosophy.  No, these absorbed lessons prepare us to love more deeply, to permit us to help others as we see and understand needs that we simply could not see or that had only irritated our younger, more impatient selves. These "golden days before they end" have that quality of beautiful brilliance, though they are not the halcyon days of our departed callowness.  Yes, they're of that orangey-yellow that is the only slightly younger brother of a sibling known as sunset.  To continue Orbison's memorable lyrics, these special days "whisper their secrets to the wind."  He was speaking of the pain of rejection and abandonment.  Yet both of these are in essence, about the abhorrence of change, another word for death. And death is not unwilling to share its story and "coming events cast their shadows" as the aphorism instructs and as Orbison's whispering days attest.   There is something unfathomable to a degree and yet unmistakably intuited as true, and therefore not frightening, about these golden rays that start to lengthen the streaks of the waning days' pinkish-blue skies.  They are merciful and ever so sweet as they prepare us for not just a metamorphosis, but the promise of a transfiguration, one that, if the source of its majesty and power could be fully comprehended in our present state as mortals, would overwhelm and pulverize our intellects like an unknown force that could melt diamonds.