Eclipiphany, Please Forgive the Pun

Because Seeing a Once in a Lifetime Phenomenon Should Get You Thinking

I’m fortunate enough to live directly in the path of this week’s total solar eclipse.

Not only that, but I’m fortunate enough that the weather behaved long enough for me to view it, and that I have the flexibility to sit outside and stare at the sky in the middle of the day.

I suppose the last part is due to my choices, rather than by chance.

In fact, I attribute very little of my life experience to fortune or chance, especially when it comes to matters of success and happiness. There are only a few random chance events in life that can trump a lifetime of intentional choices, setting you up for success. However, in this case, I’ll have to tip my hat to Tyche (the goddess of Chance). I did not intentionally place myself in the eclipse’s path, and I probably wouldn’t have traveled for it this year if it didn’t happen in my backyard.

So here we are, back to luck. It’s overwhelming to imagine how many factors had to precisely coincide so that I could step outside my front door, look up, and literally see the stars align… Well, almost. Technically one of them was the moon, but the other was definitely a star!

If I had missed it, I wouldn’t have been able to regret it, since I wouldn’t know what kind of impact it could have. Having seen it, I know that it would have been a regrettable sight to miss. I had no idea how much awe it would inspire or what it would leave me contemplating in the following days. If you get the chance, I do think now that it would be worth traveling to see one.

Sure, this kind of eclipse happens once every few years – somewhere on the planet – but often it's in an inaccessible location like the middle of the ocean.

Even when it’s not, it’s costly and inconvenient to travel for it. And if you do, there’s always the chance that a rogue cloud or rainstorm will block out the entire event. The news claimed that for any given city, being in the direct path of a total solar eclipse happens roughly once every 375 years, making it a once-in-several-lifetimes event. At this time, the next one to happen in the contiguous United States won’t be until August of 2044.

As much as I boast about my stellar fortune, I have to admit there was a distinct possibility that we would lose our chance to view the eclipse here as well. It’s been particularly rainy these past few weeks, and we weren’t certain whether the storm would remain at bay long enough to see the moment of full coverage.

Magically, even the stormy skies turned out to be beneficial. 

The scattered cloud cover made it possible to glimpse the partial eclipse filtered through the clouds. It also allowed me to snag a few photos without awkwardly positioning the dark orange lens of my cardboard eclipse glasses over my phone’s camera. In the clouded photos, the sun’s light reflects brilliantly off the surrounding clouds, even when shielded nearly halfway by the moon.

As the clouds waxed and waned, the world around me would darken then snap back to full sunlight, even as the coverage of the eclipse crept to 70%, then 90%. If you weren’t looking closely, it might have been a typical, sunny Texas afternoon. The only hint of what was coming was the distortion of the light filtering through the trees, which formed into thousands of tiny crescents. 

I imagine looking down at my street from a plane or high rise above and seeing the crisp edge of the moon’s shadow inching towards us, traveling vaguely South-West. Would it be scary to see it coming? It could be right out of a horror movie: Run! Save yourselves! Get out of here before the darkness touches you! Surely, there was a time in our history when it was scary – a time when people didn’t flock as tourists to see this kind of thing.

Finally, the real darkness fell around us. This final transformation was shockingly abrupt, from sunlit afternoon, to dusk, to nighttime darkness – automatic neighborhood lights coming on around us – in seconds.

Am I the only one who imagined that the darkness would happen gradually? That it would start little by little, from the moment the moon started to block the sun and finally culminate over an hour later? It was nothing like I had imagine, but looking back it makes sense that the rapid transition was between being out of and inside the moon’s shadow as it passed over us.

Where I live, we had about 3 minutes of totality. Leading up to those, we had glanced at the sun through almost black lenses, seeing the orange-tinted crescent shrink further and further. We alternated between checking on the size of the crescent and examining the world around us as the faux dusk settled over the neighborhood. Finally, when the orange lenses left the crescent almost invisible, I lifted them away from my eyes.

The sporadic clouds had vanished entirely.

The ring of light – the sun’s atmosphere – was visible now that the moon had completely blocked the sun’s surface. It was a black orb haloed by a jagged ring of light, hoisted in the night-like sky. It was absolutely unique. I’ve seen photos of total solar eclipses. I can’t say that it didn’t look like the photos. It did, but seeing it in person was a totally different experience.

I should have brought a better camera, I thought, trying to capture the beauty before me with my phone. How long would it take to run back inside and get it? How long would it take to fuddle with the settings and try to capture a sharp image? How long would I be staring at the mundane* device in my hands rather than the miracle of what was happening in the sky above?

*I say mundane despite the fact that I would normally say that a digital camera is an incredible feat of human engineering in itself, but everything is relative.

I stayed. I put away my phone, took my husband’s hand, and we looked up in wonder together.

Did you know that the sun is 400 times the size of the moon, but coincidentally also 400 times farther away? What a crazy random happenstance! (Dr. Horrible, anyone?)

If the moon were too large, or too close, it would blot out the sun entirely, rather than leaving the halo. If it were smaller or farther away, it wouldn’t cover the body of the sun enough to permit us to look at it with the naked eye. Even if we could, it would certainly look different — maybe it would look more like a gold donut than a soft halo, but I’m not an astronomer, so don’t look at me. The same applies for the size and distance of the sun. Even the orbits of all three astral bodies — the earth, moon, and sun — must line up in order to create this unbelievably beautiful celestial phenomenon.

But that’s enough about astral geometry.

An event like an eclipse, especially one as rare as this one, is a gift. To someone who thinks constantly about the future and the past, the choices we can make – big and small, and the unfathomable number of possibilities for our human lives: it’s nice to be reminded sometimes how small and inconsequential we really are.

Hear me out, okay?

It’s nice to be small, because you realize that the universe doesn’t care what we do. It doesn’t care about our politics, our celebrities, our friend-group drama, or that some of us hate our jobs. The Universe is just going to keep right-on turning, no matter what we do.

One way you can take it is that nothing matters, and that it’s depressing and horrible, and you shouldn’t even try because nothing you do will ever matter in the scope of the Universe.

The other way you can take is that nothing matters, and therefore everything you do only matters as much as it means to you. Your life and all the accomplishments in it have whatever meaning you assign to them. It’s freeing.

Once you harness the power of “nothing matters,” you are unstoppable. It doesn’t fix anything for you, but it enables you to write your own rulebook and live up to it as you wish. Don’t you like the idea of being able to win at your own game, because you know exactly what’s going to earn points towards success, happiness, and fulfillment, and what results in a penalty?

Internalizing this won’t make your life easier, or solve all your problems. If you do take the “nothing matters so why try” approach, well… I hope you are content with your current state because it’s likely the best you’ll attain with that mindset. Either way, good luck. If you do, on the other hand, choose to set your own standards, the possibilities are endless. The only catch is that you need to show up and play the game for which you’ve chosen the rules. You need to be putting in the time and effort every day.

The Universe doesn’t care if you take an unmerited sick day, quiet-quit the job you hate, or settle in for the weekend as a lump on your couch, binge-watching the latest Netflix special. The only one who will suffer from any instance of not playing the game is you.

Incredible things happen in our Universe. And you can contribute to incredible things on some scale. The Universe may not bat an eye, but you can impact yourself, your family, your friends, your community, your country, and maybe even your world. Just remember that in order to make the changes you want, you need to do the work.

I’ve seen no end to jokes online about developing super powers after the eclipse, especially for people who had a birthday or other life event land on Monday. I doubt any of us will discover the power to stop time, shoot fireballs, or fly anytime soon, but I do feel transformed. My eclipse superpower is simple: perspective.

My “nothing matters” is knowing that we shouldn’t live for strangers or society. We shouldn’t worry about how we’ll be remembered or whether we will have had enough impact on the world. We should just be the best we can be every day, and do the things that serve the purpose we have chosen. We should take inspiration from the wonders of our world, but keep in mind that our self is really the only judge of our actions who will matter in the end.