A week ago, a childhood dream was fulfilled when I was wrapped in the immersive experience of a total eclipse. I read about eclipses when I was about seven, so that means I waited sixty-five years to see it. It was everything it possibly could have been, but the real gift of the day turned out to have nothing to do with the eclipse itself.
With ninety-nine percent of the sun blocked by the moon, there’s still daylight, though pale. The shadow of the moon moves across the earth at more than two thousand miles an hour, and it’s impossible to describe how fast darkness descends once that last one percent of sunlight is covered by the moon. The temperature drops noticeably, and the sounds of birds and animals cease. None of the dramatic pictures of the sun’s corona prepared me for seeing it with my own eyes. It’s a hypnotic experience, and because it only lasts a couple of minutes, difficult to turn away from.
But something told me to look around, so as everyone else was looking up, I looked around. The light on the horizon was a shade of blue I’d never seen before in the sky and as beautiful as the eclipse itself. Because we were in the Adirondack Mountains, there was still a bit of snow on the ground, which made it possible for me to see a rare phenomenon associated with eclipses, and one I’d never even heard about. It looked like the patterns of water in a stream moving quickly across the snow. Apparently, they’re called shadow bands. Like the corona, and the shade of blue near the horizon, it was mesmerizing.
I haven’t gotten to the real gift of the day. Waiting to see this spectacle for sixty-five years had given me plenty of time to build up very specific expectations about how I thought it was going to be, and how I wanted it to be. Happily, I completely abandoned those expectations. The traffic on the New York State Thruway was heavy for the two-hour drive, and once off the Thruway, it became bumper to bumper. But because I was treating the day like an adventure, it didn’t matter to me. The weather, which had been sunny in the morning, was clouding up a bit. It would have been easy for me to see this as a disaster, but I decided to let the day be whatever it was going to be.
At the very least, even with thick cloud cover, I’d see something I’d never seen before: two “sunrises” and “sunsets” in one day.
Ten minutes before totality, a huge patch of blue sky opened up around the sun. As a result, I got to see a total eclipse in a clear sky. It reminded me that humans always do better without very specific expectations about how an experience is “supposed” to be. Because my only expectation was to be surprised, the experience would have been a delight no matter what happened. In the end, I got to see everything I had ever hoped to see, but that was just a bonus on top of the perfect day I was already having.
Because I had no expectations, I had no disappointments. I was willing to be surprised and delighted at whatever happened, and I was. My lack of expectations and willingness to regard whatever happened, and whatever I saw as a wonderful adventure were the real gifts of that day. It was a reminder that disappointments can only happen when I’ve got firm expectations about what “should” happen.
I finally got to see exactly what I’d wanted to see since I was a boy. But that paled in comparison to the real gift of the day: the willingness to let the day be exactly as it was going to be, and to see the perfection that flows from that.
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