There are songs we hear as children that somehow stay with us long after we have forgotten where we first heard them. For generations, one of those songs has been “Tomorrow” from Annie.

Annie was a little girl living through circumstances she had almost no control over. She couldn’t change where she came from. She couldn’t make her parents return. She couldn’t control the adults around her or know what her future would look like. Yet she had this almost stubborn relationship with hope.

“The sun will come out tomorrow.”

The musical opened on Broadway in 1977, and “Tomorrow” became its anthem of optimism. Nearly fifty years later, we still know those words.

Maybe because all of us, at some point, have needed an Annie inside of us saying: “hang on. This moment is not the whole story”.

I have always been fascinated by the sun and the sky. I love a beautiful sunset, and I crave watching a sunrise.

And recently I started thinking about how strange that actually is.

Think about how often we photograph the sky.

After the obvious subjects of our lives — people we love, our children, our pets, our food, the places we visit — sunrise and sunset have to be among the most universally photographed things on Earth.

And yet they may also be among the most predictable.

A sunset isn’t a rare event: It happened yesterday. It will happen tonight. It will happen tomorrow.

For as long as human beings have existed, people have watched the sky grow light in the morning and dark at night.

And still, when the sky suddenly turns pink, orange, purple, or red, we stop.

People pull their cars over. We walk outside. We call someone over to the window.

“Come look at the sky.”

And almost instinctively, we reach for our phones and take another picture.

Why?

We already have sunset pictures. We have seen hundreds of sunsets. There will be another one tomorrow.

Why are we still so moved by something that happens every single day?

Maybe part of the answer is that although sunrise happens every day, this sunrise has never happened before.

These exact clouds. This exact light. This exact combination of colors. This exact moment.

And maybe, most importantly, this exact version of me standing underneath it.

It will never happen precisely this way again.

But there is another paradox about the sky that I find even more fascinating.

The sun doesn’t actually “come out” tomorrow. The sun doesn’t rise. The sun doesn’t set.

We do.

The Earth is turning while the sun continues to shine.

What we experience as sunrise and sunset is really a change in our position in relationship to the light.

And suddenly that childhood song means something completely different to me.

Maybe hope isn’t always waiting for the light to come back.

Maybe sometimes we are the ones who need to turn.

There are moments in life when it feels like the light disappeared.

We lose clarity. We lose hope. Something hurts. Something ends. We become afraid.

And because we cannot see the light from where we are standing, we can easily believe it isn’t there.

But nighttime does not mean the sun stopped shining.

It means that, for this moment, we are facing away from it.

The light still exists.

There is something deeply comforting about that.

So much of life is not about controlling what exists outside of us. Sometimes it is about noticing where we are standing in relationship to it.

Maybe that is why “The sun will come out tomorrow” is more profound than I ever realized.

Scientifically, the sun doesn’t need to come back.

We do.

We turn.

And eventually we find ourselves facing the light again.

And yet, we humans need markers. We need beginnings and endings. So we have built our lives around sunrise and sunset.

Morning says, start again.

Evening says, you may put this day down.

There is something incredibly compassionate about a new morning.

Yesterday may have been messy. We may have said the wrong thing, made the wrong choice, wasted time, been afraid, disappointed ourselves, or simply had a terrible day.

And then morning arrives without asking whether we earned another chance.

Here you go. Another day. Try again.

Maybe that is why sunrise feels like possibility.

I get another beginning.

And sunset feels like permission.

I can let this day go.

But I think we sometimes give too much power to midnight, Monday morning, January 1, birthdays, anniversaries, and sunrises.

We forget that we are allowed to turn toward the light at 11:17 on an ordinary Wednesday morning.

A hard conversation does not have to ruin the day. A difficult morning does not own the afternoon. One mistake does not get custody of the next hour.

We can have many sunrises in a single day.

We can stop. Reorient. Begin again.

We don’t actually need the sky to change before we give ourselves permission to change.

And maybe sunset teaches the opposite lesson. There are things we are not meant to solve tonight. There are conversations that can wait. There are questions that do not need answers before we go to sleep. There are days that simply need to be finished.

Sunset gives us permission to say:

“I carried this as far as I could today. I can put it down now.”

And darkness itself is not necessarily the enemy.

Sometimes darkness is where we charge.

Our phones go dark when we plug them in. Our bodies repair themselves while we sleep. Seeds begin their work underground.

So much preparation happens where nobody can see it.

Maybe some seasons of our lives are like that too. Not every dark season means we are lost. Sometimes we are resting. Sometimes we are processing. Sometimes we are healing. Sometimes something inside of us is quietly gathering the energy required for the next sunrise.

There is a difference between darkness and absence.

Just because I cannot see something does not mean it no longer exists.

And then there is the part I find most beautiful:

The sun never needed to be convinced to shine again.

It was shining the whole time.

Perhaps that is why “The sun will come out tomorrow” has stayed with us for almost fifty years.

It gives language to something we desperately want to believe — that darkness is temporary.

But today I hear an additional message inside those words.

Don’t only wait for tomorrow.

Turn.

Turn toward someone who loves you. Turn toward prayer. Turn toward possibility. Turn toward whatever reminds you that this moment is not the entire landscape of your life.

And when you cannot turn yet, rest.

Charge in the darkness. There will be another sunrise. There will also be another sunset. Tomorrow will come.

But so will the next hour.

And this brings me back to the question I started with.

Why do we keep photographing the sun?

Why do we stop for the five-hundredth sunset as though we have never seen one before?

Maybe somewhere inside us we understand something important.

Something doesn’t have to be rare to be extraordinary.

We don’t photograph a sunset because we’ve never seen one.

We photograph it because we noticed this one.

And maybe that is gratitude. Not constantly needing something new to appreciate life, but developing the eyes to see what has been there all along.

The people we see every morning. The voice we hear every day. The table we sit around. The ability to walk outside. The sky above us.

The ordinary things we have encountered so many times that we have stopped realizing how extraordinary they are.

Familiarity has a strange ability to make miracles look ordinary.

Maybe gratitude reverses that.

It teaches us to look again. To notice again. To be amazed again.

The sun has been showing up our entire lives, and somehow, on the right evening, we still stand underneath it speechless.

Maybe that’s the lesson.

The sun rises every day, and we still look up.

Maybe gratitude is learning to look at the familiar as though we are seeing it for the first time.

Maybe hope is remembering that the light did not disappear simply because, for a little while, we could not see it.

And maybe beginning again is realizing that we don’t always have to wait for tomorrow to turn toward it.

With much love and respect,

-Matana