Far Off the Path of Totality
Eclipse Day 2024. Some people planned road trips and vacations around the event; for others the whole thing passed without notice. For me, the most notable thing about the day had little to do with the orbit of the moon or the sun (unless you’re considering the astrologers’ opinion that “Eclipse-season chaos is a very real phenomenon”). My Eclipse Day was a wet bar of soap that I just couldn’t keep a grip on. Call it a supercharged case of the Mondays.
I woke up tired, despite having gone to bed early. I lay there, awake, debating the merits of sleeping in against the benefits of sticking to the freshly-minted new morning routine I devised just last week. It had been devised out of necessity, a humble admission that something needed to seriously change if I was ever, against all odds, going to get some writing done. Eventually, I decided to get moving. Habits are made by taking action, even if those actions are small and taken 45 minutes later than you’d hoped.
I was finally washed, dressed and ready to change my life when a text message reminded me that I was due at the office — luckily only 10 minutes away — like, RIGHT NOW.
Part of my grand time-management plan (again, devised just last week, at the start of the month) is to take 10 minutes each morning to write down a schedule and to-do list for the day ahead. It’s a practice that I know helps me feel less overwhelmed and scattered, but which I often skip, feeling that I am too busy to spend that thoughtful time with my planner. There are emails to answer, after all! Slacks to slack back! Implementing a mandatory (and mere) 10 minutes of day-planning time has revealed that, ironically, this task does not take 10 minutes. I’ll set a timer, make my plan, then go about my day, only to be surprised 8 minutes later when the alarm I set goes off. The fiction that I was too busy to stop and think was just that — a fiction.
This Eclipse Day, however, day-planning was ruled out the instant I got that text message and realized my scheduling mistake. I scooped up my purse and computer bag, then spent a frantic minute looking for my purse (it was on my shoulder, under my computer bag — yes, my bad shoulder, but carefully considering how to carry my bags takes time I did not have). I got to the office in 10 minutes flat, got everything set up, and had minutes to spare before my host1 arrived. Phew!
After the meeting, I sat down with my host to go over our calendars. We both had notebooks out. I had all my scheduling windows open on my second monitor. And then one of my coworkers noted the time: it was 11:10am, just a few minutes before the Eclipse was set to be at its peak. In LA, we were not all that close to the “Path of Totality” — the swath of the world that got to see 100% apparent coverage of the sun by the moon. Ours was something like 48%. But still — it’s not every day the sun is half covered up by the moon. So we went out with a colander from the office kitchen, hoping to watch the obstructed sun cast obstructed light through the tiny circles. And we were not disappointed. It was a beautiful day in Los Angeles, and our corner of MacArthur Park was unusually peaceful. We stayed and looked at weird shadows on the sidewalk until about 11:30.
It was just as the elevator arrived to take us back upstairs that I got my next schedule-busting text of the day: “Do you have the Zoom link?” it read. That’s when I realized that I was several minutes late for an 11:30 Zoom meeting. It was, in fact, a Zoom rehearsal for an event I’m performing in. I had thought it was happening a bit later — a misconception that would have been cleared up if I’d taken, say, 10 minutes to look at my schedule for the day. The event itself, ironically enough, will be a kind of celebration of new beginnings, with ritual and intention setting. I’m leading a meditation on how to be okay with doing less. Irony on top of irony. It was actually at an early rehearsal for the show that I’d first heard the idea that the eclipse had an astrological significance of any kind. “Eclipse brain,” someone called it. “Anyone else feeling really tired lately?” she’d asked. I couldn’t say no, but I also couldn’t blame the eclipse: I’d been tired since January.
When the Zoom ended, I took a look at my phone. My friend Mary Kate had sent me a photo she’d taken with her professional camera. The eclipse at totality, shot from the Cotton Bowl, where she’d been hired to photograph a special event. She’d spent the eclipse with a stadium full of lucky school kids, watching as the sky turned dark and feeling the sensation of communal awe that reminds us who, what, and where we are. That reminds us to be grateful for those things.
Looking up from my jumbled day, I longed to have been a little closer to the path of totality.
Then again: When four of us from the office came down nine floors and stood in the sunshine, staring at shadows, that was a communal experience. We might not have been bowled over with awe, but we spent nearly 20 minutes giggling and wowing at crescent-shaped shadows on the ground. And before it was over, my coworker Daniel said emphatically that he would never forget the experience. And I agreed with him.
Listen, I know it’s been a long time since I’ve sent out a Metaforia. I can blame my busy schedule, the extra side-work I’ve taken on so far this year, or a growing list of personal commitments. It would be the truth, but not the whole truth.
The whole truth is that it’s easy to write about the “Path of Totality” kind of events. Pilgrimages to England, say. Attending my own movie premiere. Discovering a wealth of family history you’d never known was so well documented. Big, wild, gratifying moments. Across its history, Metaforia has far more often been about much smaller, everyday observations. I always wanted it to be so. But making meaning from the everyday takes time and space for processing, wandering, and wondering. And that’s the time that I’m not allowing myself lately. That’s what I’m trying to figure out how to get back.
When I left the house in such an immediate hurry on Eclipse Day morning, I forgot to grab one of the pairs of eclipse glasses that my roommate’s partner had left on our coffee table. They’d been sitting there for weeks. When the time came, none of us in my little group had special glasses. But we got creative. We came up with a way to observe, indirectly, what we could not see with our naked eyes.
It wasn’t a life-changing experience, far as we were from the path of totality. If we hadn’t made the effort, we would have missed it altogether. And maybe that’s what made the moment so memorable: We did make the effort. We didn’t miss it.
For context, my job is as a podcast producer. One reason (though not the only reason) I go into the office is to record episodes in our studio. That was the deal this day — I had to meet the show’s host to record in-studio.