The August star show has once again dazzled. We shouldn’t be surprised; it is a regular recurring event. We always know it is coming; we get plenty of reminders, but somehow we always wind up being unexpectedly mesmerized by the spectacle of an array of never before seen stars that briefly and delightfully captivate our attention. Especially this year, when the Perseid meteor shower placed twice the usual annual number of fireballs into the night sky, the most since the most recent outlier year of 2009.
You can be forgiven if you thought I was referring to the Summer Olympics, now being contested in the middle of the Brazilian winter (talk about first world privilege; we even get to define the seasons!). These two phenomena bear an eerie number of parallels. The Perseid meteor showers are the product of the entry into Earth’s atmosphere of parts of the debris field left by the orbit of the Comet Swift-Tuttles. The comet itself is 16 miles wide and has been orbiting the Sun for as long as the Earth has. The portions of detritus left in its trail that burn up in our atmosphere are relative grains of sand; they are very ordinary bits of small debris in the galactic scheme of things. But it is the juxtaposition of that ordinariness with their brief and beautiful luminescence that so entrances us.
Every four years, the Olympic star show bursts upon our consciousness. We are drawn by the big “comets”; Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, the celestial bodies that have burned bright enough to draw the man-made illumination of celebrity culture and reality television. We recognize that their sheen is at least in part artificial, and that our appreciation of them is tainted by the “otherness” with which we have anointed them. They are not ‘everymen’; they are Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps. And we are drawn to them in awe.
But each night, when the artificial lights dim slightly as those celebrity stars are absent from the stage, as we continue to stare hypnotically at the glow of their approach or the tail of their retreat, we unavoidably see smaller bursts of light that hold our attention just long enough to transfix us. As we change our perspective enough to allow us to focus on those smaller, more ordinary lights, an amazing thing happens. We find ourselves powerfully moved when we discover in those dimmer dancing lights the realization of the extraordinary despite if not because of their seeming ordinariness. As Canadians, we are moved by the precocious humility of phenoms like swimmer Penny Olesiak and sprinter Andre DeGrasse, the graceful sportsmanship of rising stars like diver Jennifer Abel and pole vaulter Shawn Barber and the aching and stoic disappointment of fallen champions like kayaker Adam van Koeverden and swimmer Ryan Cochrane. These are our Canadian everymen, but rest assured that every participating country has their own cosmic grain of dust that finds its opportunity to shine in the wake of the great comets.
The August summer sky is full of light. Humans have looked into that light for eons and seen not only evidence of the eternal and superhuman but also the comforting reflection of our own essence. This year is no different.
