Last week Monday, my mother passed away. Since then, I’ve found myself observing the sky in the evenings watching the light slip and asking questions I hadn’t asked before.
We often treat dusk and twilight as interchangeable. A shorthand for the fading of day, the slow dimming toward night.
But they are not the same.
Dusk is the end. It is when the sun has dropped below the horizon, when the day has formally surrendered, when the last edge of light is clipped.
Twilight is what follows: the lingering, the afterglow, the memory of light. The world isn’t day, but it isn’t yet night either. It is an in-between space both fleeting and oddly eternal.
This distinction has become deeply personal.
The Thresholds We Overlook
We live in a culture that prefers clean lines.
Beginnings and endings. Black and white. Open and closed.
Yet some of the most profound experiences resist this neatness. Grief, for one. It doesn’t announce itself like dusk—finished, absolute. It behaves more like twilight. It lingers, it glows strangely in unexpected moments, it reshapes the familiar into something uncanny.
What we call endings are often thresholds. They aren’t final, they’re liminal. They’re invitations to stand in a space where categories blur, where presence becomes memory, and where absence still carries weight.
Twilight is proof that we live much of our lives not in absolutes, but in thresholds.
How Cultures Have Spoken About Twilight
The Greeks had the Hesperides, nymphs of the evening light. Egyptians mapped the journey through the underworld as the sun slipping into twilight, carrying Ra through to dawn. In Yoruba tradition, twilight is when Esu—the divine messenger—moves between worlds.
Across mythologies, twilight was never just a time of day. It was a symbol of transition, the sacred space where the known and unknown meet.
Even in literature, twilight often signals the uncanny: when transformations happen, when boundaries dissolve. Shakespeare leaned on it. So did Neil Gaiman. Because twilight isn’t merely less light. It’s a different kind of light.
Dusk, Twilight, and Strategy
It may seem strange to leap from personal grief to business strategy, but I’ve built my work on the conviction that the two are never as far apart as they seem.
Brands, like lives, face dusks and twilights.
Some companies are at dusk: the end of their cycle, clinging to relevance long after the sun has set. Their light no longer reaches customers, no matter how hard they push.
Others are in twilight: still luminous, casting meaning, but no longer in the full strength of day. They carry memory, legacy, and story if they can recognize the glow and channel it forward.
The difference is profound. Dusk is denial. Twilight is continuity.
Knowing which stage you are in determines whether you attempt resuscitation or reinvention. And history is littered with examples: brands that mistook their dusk for twilight (Sears, Kodak) and others that transformed twilight into dawn (Apple in 1997, Burberry’s reinvention, Oracle’s long-term discipline).
A Question for All of Us
So here’s the question I’ve been asking myself, and perhaps it’s useful to ask yourself as well:
What in your life is truly dusk, an ending that must be accepted?
And what is twilight?
Still glowing, still guiding, still capable of becoming a dawn if carried forward.
The distinction is not academic. It is the difference between being anchored to what is gone and being illuminated by what remains.
In Closing
This edition is dedicated to my mother. Her dusk was last Monday. Her twilight is every word I write, every decision I make, every fragment of her light I carry forward.
May we all learn to stand with grace in that fragile, in-between space. Neither clinging to what has set, nor rushing blindly into the dark, but honoring the twilight for what it is the glow of what remains, the signal of what endures.
What twilight do you still carry and what dusks have you finally learned to accept?