A total eclipse of the “I”
United by awe-some events.
I'll never forget the collective gasp that rose from the crowd when the moon finally blotted out the sun during this week's total solar eclipse. For those breathtaking 90 seconds of eerie twilight, we were united as one by the sheer awe of bearing witness to the burning black hole in the sky.
I can't tell you what happened next, because I was dumbstruck. Tears in my eyes. Unable to say anything except 'Oh my goodness' over and over again.
As we stumbled back into the light, you could hear the existential reverberations in people's conversations - "I forgot to take a photo, I was so in it..." "Do you think we're alone in the universe?" Everywhere I walked that day, and online in the days following, I re-lived the eclipse over and over again.
But it's not the blurry photo of a white orb that I'm intrigued by. I'm pulled in by the countless videos of people hugging, tearing, jumping, singing. Humans being humans, but doing it very much together. This was no ordinary afternoon - the change was palpable in the way people looked at one another. A closeness between strangers. The palpable nature of 'the collective'.
In Niagara Falls, hundreds of people even spontaneously sang "You are my sunshine" as the sky darkened.
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Back in 2017, a similar total solar eclipse could be seen in parts of North America, and a group of researchers pored over millions of tweets from that day and found that the change in behaviour around the eclipse made perfect sense.
People who witnessed the total eclipse used way more "we" and "us" words and way fewer "I" and "me" words compared to those who missed the full show.
Eclipse-viewers were more likely to express sentiments related to helping, sharing, and supporting one another in the aftermath of the awe-inspiring event. It's as though the event yanked us out of our self-centered bubbles and stitched us back into the collective fabric - our communities, the earthly 'us'.
When everything is uncertain - everything is possible. - Mariame Kaba
For a brief moment during the eclipse, everything was uncertain. Was the sun going to re-emerge? My rational brain knew it would, but another part of me contemplated the potential that this could very well be the end of the world. The moment felt that big.
Two wildly beautiful things emerged at once: Total uncertainty (What's going to happen?) and total togetherness (We're all in this together). In that moment of collective unknowing, we felt a profound sense of connection to everyone around us.
What if we could bottle up that feeling of unity and bring it back into our everyday lives? In a world increasingly fragmented by hyper-individualism, we're losing sight of the fact that we're all in this together. The challenges we face - from climate change to social injustice - are too big for any one of us to tackle alone. The only way forward is through collective action, through recognizing our interdependence and working towards our shared well-being.
Rebuilding community involves seeing that the neighborhood, not the individual, is the essential unit of social change.
If you're trying to improve lives, you have to think about changing many elements of a single neighborhood all at once.
David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life
How do we harness the unifying power of awe and translate it into effective, sustainable action?
The key likely lies in building strong, resilient communities. As writer and organizer Ayesha Khan eloquently puts it:
Showing up for each other is what collectivist communities do. Organizing is a part of being in community and existing together as though survival is a collective burden, not an individual one.
When you share a culture, engage in rituals together, feed each other, drink tea on porches together, and gaze at the children running down the street at sundown, it isn't a huge leap to tackle problems together.
Ayesha Khan
Khan's words resonate deeply with my own experiences and observations. Time and again, I've seen how:
Building strong, trusting, and vulnerable relationships with the wider community enables us to take more risks, experiment, and imagine together. The more we share time, rituals, and commitment towards each other and our planet, the more we can organize change.
The less isolated we are, the less we are controlled by oppressive systems (like capitalism).
The more we practice being a 'we' and thinking of ourselves as part of a collective, the more we can withstand the volatility of making change happen - the burnouts, wins, losses, and mess. It becomes something we can share.
That groundedness in community sustains us for the long haul of changemaking. When we're enmeshed in webs of mutual care and solidarity, we're far more equipped to weather the inevitable storms that come with threatening the status quo. We can take bolder risks and experiment with more imaginative solutions, knowing we have a safety net of relationships to catch us.
So while awe alone isn't enough - the hard daily labor of building beloved community is even more vital - it's undeniably powerful medicine for renewing our sense of connection. In a world hell-bent on alienating us, that felt remembering of our interdependence is revolutionary.
Awe simply reopens our minds to the speculative, to the seemingly impossible, to the more just and compassionate world we may not be able to see yet but can still feel.
As we stumble back into the light of "normal life" after an awesome event like an eclipse, the challenge is to hold fast to that visceral knowing of our inescapable oneness - that bone-deep sense that our fates are bound up with each other and with this achingly beautiful planet we call home. To let it fuel our courage to keep showing up for the slow, unglamorous work of making change happen.
For a few minutes there, as darkness descended and the sun and moon did their dazzling dance above us all, I think we knew that deep down.
Let's not wait for the next eclipse to remember it.
With kindness and curiosity,
Laura
Very Nice
beautiful, inspiring and informative :)