Take a sunset.
Take a blue like the ocean swells on a cool autumn day, shining with sunlight reflected off impenetrable depths, and paint it across the sky. Let it fade, lighter and grayer, slate blue and navy, into shades of yellow, orange, purple-red behind the silhouettes of bare-branched trees. Crush the petals of sunflowers, poppies, and scarlet zinnias; stir these and smear them along the horizon. The trees are black, almost, backlit and describable by some combination of "weathered" and "tranquil" and "majestic."
Take that sunset. Take all the connotations of finality, culmination, and conclusion. Fear, frailty, and beauty.
Now add the smell of possibility.
Stretch out the boundary: this is not a denouement, but an edge, a line to cross between this moment and the next. This is potential.
Crisp air, cold and invigorating. Cracked pavement under your feet, wet from rain or melting snow. A feeling, deep in your gut, that this, the right here, right now, is going to change.
The term "bittersweet" applies. This is a contradiction, a paradoxical sense of endings and beginnings, a commencement and a climax. This is all the strange and wondrous things that belong to each.
Are you afraid? Are you excited?
This is a surreal meld of intoxication, terror, and melancholy. This is the jump out the airplane door, the hope of a parachute inflating, the exhilaration at both falling away and falling towards.
Nothing lasts forever.
What do you leave behind? The familiar was comfortable and in the dark lies the unknown. What will you see when the sun sinks below the horizon? What happens when your feet hit the ground?
This sunset feeling: this is change.
What adventure next?