On Wednesday, the moon will slip directly between the sun and the earth, and for a couple of minutes over western Iceland and parts of Spain, day will fall into a strange, cold dusk. It’s the first total solar eclipse to touch mainland Europe since 1999. From here in the UK, we’ll only get the partial version, the sun nibbled down to a crescent rather than blotted out completely, but even that has a way of stopping people in car parks and gardens, tipping their heads back, squinting up through borrowed glasses.
I’ve got a little print of the eclipse pinned near my desk, the sun and the earth drawn small and cartoonish with the moon sitting between them, and underneath it a line about how something small can appear big enough to block something much larger. I keep looking at it while I’m meant to be doing something else.
Because that’s the whole trick of it, isn’t it. The moon is about 400 times smaller than the sun. It has no business being able to hide something that size. It only manages it because of where it’s standing. Get close enough to almost anything and it stops mattering how big it actually is. I think about that a lot in relation to the things that nearly stopped me travelling.
The loudest one was always the idea of going alone. Not the practical stuff, I could work out ferries and phrasebooks and accommodation bookings well enough, it was the version of the trip that played in my head before I’d even booked anything: me, by myself, in a country where nobody knew me, and something going wrong with no one there to notice. That thought is tiny in the scheme of a life. It’s a few seconds of imagined worst-case. But stood right up close against a plane ticket, it was enough to block out the entire trip.
The second one showed up every time money was involved, and it still does. I remember adding up the cost of Australia and feeling the number physically sit on my chest before I’d even worked out whether I could afford it. Not “can I afford this,” which is a fair question, but “should someone like me be spending money on something like this,” which is a completely different one dressed up to look the same. I’ve paid that same tax on smaller trips too, weekend flights, a hotel a bit nicer than I needed. The amount on the page was never really the issue. The issue was some old idea that treating myself to something big was a bit much, a bit indulgent, not quite mine to have.
That’s the part I find myself circling lately, the question underneath the fear and the guilt. Why do we think we don’t deserve things. Not don’t need, don’t deserve. Somewhere along the way a lot of us picked up the idea that wanting something for no reason other than wanting it needs to be earned first, justified first, apologised for at minimum. Anthony Bourdain put it better than I can: travel is not reward for working, it’s education for living. If that’s true, the whole question of deserving it stops making sense. You don’t have to earn an education. You just have to be willing to show up for it. So we let a worry the size of a coin block out something the size of a country, and we call it being sensible.
I went to Australia anyway…. And a few years later I took that first solo trip, years later than I probably could have, though I’ve written elsewhere about not minding that. Both times the fear didn’t go anywhere, it just stopped being close enough to block the view. I stepped back from it, in the ordinary sense of putting distance between me and a worry rather than staring straight at it, and from a bit further away it turned out to be exactly what it was: something small, doing an impression of something insurmountable.
I don’t think the answer is talking yourself out of the fear entirely. It’s useful in small doses, it keeps you from doing anything truly stupid. But it’s worth remembering, especially on a day when the moon is doing exactly this on a much grander scale, that the thing blocking your view and the thing being blocked are very rarely the same size. On Wednesday, wherever you are, if you catch a glimpse of the sun looking strange and diminished, it might be worth asking what’s standing that close to your own light right now, and whether it’s actually as big as it feels.
Thanks to Positively Present and Anthony Bourdain for inspiration in writing this piece.
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