Am I the eclipse?
The last time I’d attended a Royals game was October 11th, 1993. It was my wife and I’s first date and George Brett’s last home game. Twenty four years later, some good friends graciously offered us a place to stay and the use of their season tickets so our kids could see their first Royals game. On two previous occasions our friends had given away their seats and twice the family receiving the tickets had caught foul balls, so expectations in our children were high. Both the day and the Royals bats were hot as we jumped out to an early lead. Midway through the game a ball flew just over our heads and a kid made a spectacular catch. Between innings, we all rocked out to John Fogerty’s “Centerfield” catching the attention of a nearby camera which flashed our family’s lip-syncing efforts up on the Royals’ Jumbotron. The Royals held on to win and and the bar for our children’s future MLB games had been forever set high.
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With the timing of the total solar eclipse the next day, we had decided to make a long weekend out of it by stopping by the former mule capitol of the world, Lathrop, MO; a town not only celebrating their sesquicentennial, but also ideally positioned to catch the full solar eclipse. As we rolled out of bed and looked out the window, the skies were darkened and we were forced with a decision: doggedly stay the course and have a 50% chance of seeing a 100% eclipse or drive south and have a 90% chance of seeing a 97% eclipse. We had seen some storm trackers on the way in to town and after a family vote, decided we were going to do the opposite of those guys, we were going to chase the sun.
After we cleared the blinding rain falling in Lee Summit, I began to listen to the story of a nun in the 18th century who was said to be able to perform miraculous healings, a feat of whose persistent historical records I’d always been skeptical of as I’d never seen one in person. When asked how she was able to accomplish such feats, she replied, “The key is finding a way to remove yourself so that God can shine through.” She had requested that her abilities be kept secret as the publicity might lead her into pride or even create envy on the parts of the other nuns, both having the effect of making it more difficult to “remove herself” in order to help others in the future.
While I continued to listen, I peered out the window. The rain had stopped, but high cloud cover was still preventing me from being able to see the sun. We continued our journey east hoping to find a suitable visibility and a park for viewing. By the time we reached Nevada, MO we’d cleared the shadows and the sun shone brightly over 300 hundred year-old pecan trees. As we pulled off for gas a fellow traveler, a family in a 2003 Eurovan with a pop-up camper top pulled in along side. They were obviously on a road trip, so I thought perhaps they could potentially provide some insight into a good spot to view the eclipse. They’d just come from Arkansas where they had visited a public diamond mind and were on their way back home to San Francisco, but said they were hoping to catch the full eclipse at it’s epicenter in St. Joseph, MO.
I asked him what he did professionally and he told me that he’d recently retired from being the medical director at Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at the University of California San Francisco. Wanting to take the lessons he’d learned in how to reduce medical errors and physician burnout, he’d teamed up with a developer at Electronic Arts to make the training of hospital staff in best practices fun and competitive. They were working on trying to close their next round of funding while pulling off a cr0ss-country trip to visit his wife’s family in Mississippi. Having traversed a similar fundraising path with my tech startup a couple years prior before I had to shut it down, it was interesting to encounter a family who was literally and metaphorically heading the opposite direction. I’d not been as wise as he, always taking my family on a ride, but never including them in my journey. Unlike the nun, I’d struggled to remove my ego from the equation and let the light shine through. I had convinced myself that all my entrepreneurial efforts were being done for my family and our future financial freedom, not to feed my ego.
I’d not been as wise as he, always taking my family on a ride, but never including them in my journey.
I asked the man if they were looking for any investors as I knew some from my fund raising days who might be looking for new deal flow (and the idea of a West Coast startup getting funded by an Iowa angel fund was just too rich to pass up). We exchanged cards and I told him that I’d been forced to learn the hard way that many times what you are looking for is right in front of you and in the case of the solar eclipse if you are lucky enough to be sitting in the sun, sometimes it’s best to stop driving.
We said our goodbyes, grabbed lunch at a drive-in run by a former presidential impersonator and headed over to the local Marmaduke park which sat on what could not have been an more aptly named street for an eclipse: Anticipation Ave. As we put on our glasses, the temperature dropped and the crickets began to chirp, we watched in amazement as the remaining slivers of light peered around the obstruction of the moon. I thought of three family’s amazing experiences at the ball park, how chance meetings at random gas stations can happen when you unselfishly include others as a part of your journey and how almost every seemingly miraculous or serendipitous event in my life has come when I wasn’t focused on myself or mired in fear.
Over the six hour drive home, I continued to think, “You don’t have to be a mystic, a nun, believe in magic, God or miracles to realize the power of staying open to new possibilities, ideas and people. You just have be willing to not be the object that is preventing the light from shining through which will in turn both illuminate your path and in turn provide warmth for those who are currently standing in your shade.”
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