I have been trying to see the Northern Lights for at least a decade. On any clear night, when I’m anywhere even the slightest bit north, I check an app to see the KP Index aurora forecast. Even when in Scotland and Norway and Iceland, it’s never been higher than about 4 (and in Iceland, the sky was rarely clear, anyway); in Argentina and New Zealand, I kept an eye on the skies for the aurora australis. I’ve planned entire vacations with an eye toward this. So I was ecstatic to check the app an hour before sunset last week and see a KP index of 9, with an 89% chance of seeing the aurora within the next hour.
On that night last week, like so many others across the country and around the world, I was treated to a spectacular show as the night darkened. My parents and I lay on our backs in a field a mile from my childhood home, staring upward at a cloudless sky on dew-damp grass. The first glimpses of the lights were subtle, barely showing up to the naked eye. Then, sometime around 10:30pm, the hundred-odd strangers in that field with us all gasped as one: the entire sky was alight. It was impossible to decide where to look. Green arched toward the horizon in every direction; pink danced overhead; strange fingers of light reached across the sky. Every time I turned my head, the view changed.
Of course, I wish I had seen the aurora borealis on one of the many trips where it seemed more likely. Coming home from Iceland without a show felt like failure—I’m rarely anywhere with so little light pollution. But there was something especially magical about witnessing it somewhere I spent most of my life.
Sometimes, patience is rewarded. Sometimes, happenstance is more important than careful planning. But always, the trick is to just keep trying.
None of these observations are surprising or novel, and they don’t mean much in the context of something as simple as the aurora borealis. But together, they are necessary in facing the longer, deeper battles of life.
For a long time, I wanted to see rewards from my efforts, or at least to believe there might be some. If I’m honest, I feel this way still. What’s the point of trying, if our chances of success are unlikely, or the time horizon of our projects are too long for us to see? In the context of the grandest challenges, though—the things most deserving of our efforts—this distant view, this focus on unlikely success, is the only one that matters.
It’s trite, but if you want to enjoy enormous trees in your old age, it’s worth planting a seedling today. Recently, I gazed up at the baby redwood that was our Christmas tree the year I was born. In a century, it’ll be the tallest tree in the small woodland where it was planted. It’s probably forty feet tall, and hopefully has multiple millennia before it.
I struggle to hold onto the mindset that says it’s worth trying to solve problems too big to wrap your head around, but we can all plant a single tree, tend a single garden, chip off a tiny piece of the enormous problems we face and grind away at that piece until it’s solved. It’s worth it to fight, even if progress is imperceptible, even if we’ve long-since left behind the chance to succeed the way we might have wanted to.
Sometimes, I talk to people my grandparents’ age who lament that climate change leaves them feeling hopeless. They wonder how it’s possible for someone my age to go forward, to plan a life. I think this is the wrong view of hope. Hope isn’t thinking things will be alright. Hope is thinking things might be better than the worst case scenario.
People have lived through small apocalypses longer than they have been people. Many lives, human and otherwise, have unfolded entirely against the backdrop of encroaching disaster. We are not special, those of us confronting an unstable world that’s ending every day.
No ending is final. No failure is certain. Every bit better than the very worst is worth grasping.
We can wander far afield, searching for successes that seem more certain, but the truth is that no triumph is ever sure or final, and no doom can hold onto us. It’s worth facing the problems where we are, and solving them, even if we don’t see how it can solve the grander problem. Every bit of struggle is worth it.
This morning, the small problem I could face was invasive ivy choking native trees and ferns. I spent two hours pulling long strands of roots up from the loose soil. In a year, the hillside we freed will look like the healthy forest through which we hiked to reach the ivy apocalypse.
Amid the ivy, we found a bird nest, a native bird finding shelter where she could, dutifully tending her eggs amid the invasion. We left that ivy alone. Its annihilation can be left for a few more weeks, until the eggs hatch and the babies fly away. That bird and her offspring will be just another family striving through a slow-moving disaster, flourishing in spite of it all.