Reflect

From where we live, it was never going to be a total eclipse. The path of totality, the narrow track in which the Moon covers the Sun completely, crossed eastern Greenland, western Iceland and the north of Spain, missing the British Isles by a few hundred miles. What we were promised instead was a very deep partial eclipse, with somewhere between ninety and ninety-six per cent of the Sun covered depending on where you stood.

By the evening, my family were, for once, all in the same street at the same time, which my husband pointed out is an alignment rather rarer than the astronomical one!

The great pinhole project began days earlier and with a domestic dispute, because a cereal box is only available to science once the cereal inside has been consumed! We had two boxes, four viewers to make and one family member who does not care for Weetabix and refused, on principle, to eat six of them at speed in the family interest. In the end, we compromised: one box was emptied properly and the other was decanted into a mixing bowl and covered with a tea towel.

When the eclipse occurred, as promised, the light turned thin and metallic and shadows sharpened. The temperature dropped and it felt eerie and magical and extraordinary all at once! We watched the whole thing alongside a small crowd of town residents, none of whom knew one another very well, but for ninety seconds a random collection of dog walkers, teenagers and people with cereal boxes and colanders were astronomers responding in harmony with a collective exclamation of “Woah!”.

Motivate

More than two thousand years ago Babylonian astronomers spotted that eclipses repeat on a cycle of about eighteen years, eleven days and eight hours, and could forecast them without having any idea what caused them. The Greeks went further and built a machine for it called the Antikythera mechanism, which was geared to run through 223 lunar months and its dial marked to show when an eclipse was possible and what sort it would be. In 1715, Edmond Halley (of Comet fame of course!) published a map of the Moon's shadow crossing Britain, working from lunar tables and observation.

In the run up to this summer’s eclipse, I really enjoyed listening to interviews with modern solar scientists and observatory staff, as they fielded questions from TV presenters. These people were relishing the chance to educate others. I enjoyed learning about the corona, the Sun's wispy outer atmosphere which only becomes visible to the naked eye during totality and how the reason not to glance at the Sun is because the retina has no pain receptors at all, so the damage happens silently, with nothing to warn you to look away!

I found myself wondering where all of it began for these professors and experts in their field. As children, was there was someone in their family who lifted them up to a window and pointed out the Moon? Was there somebody who loved hearing their endless questions and encouraged them to seek answers? Perhaps their parents came in from work at some point to find the kitchen table or their bedroom floor covered in an experiment and exclaimed: “Show me what you are working on!", before commenting on any mess.

These days, we have to work harder to find space (excuse the pun) and time to cultivate a sense of wonder and curiosity in family life. But what do those words even mean? Wonder is a slippery thing to define, but most of us recognise it when it happens. It is the pause before the question, the involuntary 'oh' that arrives ahead of any explanation. It is not the same as fun, and it is not quite the same as interest either. Fun is comfortable; wonder is faintly destabilising, because it involves standing in front of something you don’t fully understand.

It is tricky to wonder when we live in households where absolutely any question can be answered in seconds via a phone, smart speaker or ChatGPT, all of which will supply a confident explanation. Another threat to time for wondering is that we are living in a time when natural interest is squeezed out of childhood by busy family timetables, extra-curricular activities and the allure of screens. Boredom has become devalued and indeed perhaps even feared, as it tends to generate moaning rather than galaxy-gazing.

So how can we be more intentional? When the questions come, can we resist the smart speaker for a minute or two? There is a richness in wondering first, in guessing badly, in working out what we already know before we outsource it.

Can we also consciously ‘look up and notice’ things audibly, in front of children, because they calibrate what is remarkable by watching the things that stop us in our tracks. Can we put ourselves in front of something vast now and again? Perhaps a planetarium, a cathedral, a coastline?

Psychologists who study awe describe something they call the 'small self', the mildly disorientating sense of shrinking that comes over us in the presence of something vast and awe-inspiring. Paul Piff and colleagues found that people who had just experienced awe made more ethical decisions and behaved more generously than those in comparison conditions. He found that participants who had spent a minute simply looking up into a grove of towering eucalyptus trees were more likely to help a stranger who had dropped a handful of pens, and reported a lower sense of entitlement, than those who had spent the same minute looking at a tall building. In other words, feeling small seems to make us less preoccupied with ourselves, and being less preoccupied with ourselves, makes us kinder to those around us. Awe turns our attention outwards, which is quite the opposite of diminishing us.

Back to family life and the role of questioning to open up our children’s thinking. We can try to ask better questions at supper: 'What surprised you today?', “What did you hear that got you thinking today?” might stimulate a far more interesting answer than the usual, 'What did you learn?'. We could listen to science podcasts together and chew over the content. Brains On! is made for children and families or, NASA's Curious Universe is accessible for most families with tweens and teens and Houston, We Have a Podcast suits older teenagers who might need more stretch. If you just want some questions that sound smart, complete with answers written by real-life scientists, have a peek at this article on the Artemis journey or read through a few snazzy questions around the dinner table. Tooled Up even has some cute resources to start early conversations with little scientists.

Let’s ensure that all our children understand science is for them, not just for others. This simple video from Verizon highlights so neatly how adults can inadvertently diminish early signs of wonder and curiosity through gender stereotyping, for example.

Support

Earlier this week, I was speaking with a parent about grief, and we found ourselves talking, quite unexpectedly, about the eclipse. She had watched it, and it had struck her as an unusually accurate picture of what the past month had felt like: the light thinning, the temperature dropping and the ordinary world briefly and bizarrely suspended. What she articulated on our call was that the darkness of the eclipse genuinely won for a moment, and then lifted, simply because the Moon kept moving and the Earth kept turning. We talked about the fact there is something steadying in the idea that darkness can be real, and total, and temporary, all at once, and that the rhythm underneath everything carries on regardless and carries us with it.

If your family is in the middle of something difficult as term begins, do tell their school. I promise you staff want to know because they want to understand what that child may have been through, how they support that child as they return and it helps staff understand a child’s emotional responses during the school term. At home, as trite as it sounds, keep the ordinary rhythms where you can; routine is not a distraction from grief, but a brilliant handrail through it.

Expect wobbles and expect a child to move in and out of the ‘puddles of grief’ for a long while yet. But have some confidence in the plain routine of the school term to offer them a little respite.

If there is one thing I would want a struggling family to take from this Wednesday Wisdom, it is that belonging to something bigger than ourselves is among the strongest protections we have for our mental health and our resilience. Perhaps that is why watching something happen out there in the universe stays with us. For those ninety seconds, across the world, we were watching for the same shadow, conscious that we will have passed when it next occurred.

Looking up now and again and noticing where we sit inside something so gargantuan and so orderly, isn’t escapism but rather one of the ways we remind our children, and ourselves, that we are never really on our own. As a new school year starts, I find joy and hope in remembering that.