Alignment

April 18, 2024

When I was in elementary school, I played baseball as part of my town's Little League program. The league had recently converted from all-boys to all-welcome, which was useful because I was not in any way athletic; I just a) loved the game and b) (let's be honest) liked being surrounded by boys. Danny Patalano's dad, the Panthers' coach, put up with me because despite being the worst player on the team, I showed up no matter the weather, I was unshakably cheerful, and I always did my best.

One of the Panthers' biggest rivals was the Lions; they were much better than we were, so we always lost, except for one outlier game late in the season when we came out on top. After that game, I told Mr. Patalano, "Last night, I prayed hard that we would win, and look, we did!" He smiled at me, and I'll never forget his response: "I don't think that was it. God didn't hate the Lions today, and he didn't hate us for those other games," he said. "We just played better than they did this time."

Hearing that at age 11 set me up for a lifelong understanding that there are things I can influence and things I can't. Last week's total solar eclipse is a case in point: Weather on Earth being what it is, there was no way that everyone in North America could have a clear view. Indianapolis, Little Rock, and Cleveland no more deserved their perfect sky totality than San Antonio, Buffalo, and Rochester deserved their clouds. What each of us saw as we looked up was due to the laws of physics, pure and simple; there was no success and no failure.

An eclipse is a beautiful alignment of our solar system whose meaning doesn't exist somewhere ineffably out in the universe, but within each person who made the effort to have the experience. And the legacy of each eclipse comes from the community preparations beforehand and the way we tell the stories afterward. None of us had a choice about what happened in our sky, but the most important lesson to remember is that humans can choose to be forces for good right here on the ground. The story, and that kind of karma, is all up to you.

—Deb