“Once in a lifetime” read the headline of the Evansville Courier. In the newspaper, on billboards, and on the nightly news, you could not escape knowing that on the afternoon on April 8th the city will experience a total solar eclipse. It is expected to be a big deal for our community.
Community leaders hope this celestial event will bring upwards of 80,000 visitors who will spend money on lodging, meals, and shopping finds. Evansville’s a city that’s gone from a t-shirt motto of “We’re Evansville” (with the implied “Enough Said” tagline) to today’s “E is for everyone” and is excited to make a better impression.
Because so many people might be visiting the city for the first time, city officials want to pull out all the stops to make sure it’s a favorable first impression.
Clearly a lot of money and time has been invested in maximizing this minutes-long event that won’t happen again in our lifetime. For more than a year, the city of Evansville’s tourism organization has been hosting monthly Regional Eclipse Task Force meetings to share information and help businesses and organizations plan for the thousands of visitors the city hopes will visit to experience the total eclipse. Before those meetings, the city began planning soon after the 2017 eclipse when the city was on the edge of the solar eclipse path.
It’s shaping up to be a community-wide holiday with schools closing and some businesses closing at noon to allow employees time to prepare to experience the event with their family and friends.
While it’s great to plan for an event to welcome new visitors to the city, I keep thinking of how much time and money have gone into a snapshot event that will soon be past us.
Considering the years of planning and how keenly aware city officials were of the opportunity to take advantage of being in the path of the eclipse, I wonder if the same amount and level of investment would be made to something more lasting and also “once in a lifetime.” It reminds me of the admonition we hear that we spend more time planning a single vacation than we do our retirement.
What if we were to look at other events that are “once in a lifetime” for the people experiencing them?
The children who will be born to first-time parents this year. This is each of those children’s once in a lifetime entry into the world. Planning for how to support them and their parents would have much more impact than thousands of visitors to any community for a day.
The students who will graduate from high school in 2030. For those students, the day they transition from high school to the next stage of their work or schooling is a “once in a lifetime” event. Could we help students, parents, and the educational community cast a vision for their graduation day? What would the students and their supporters want them to have achieved? What skills and resources would prepare them to celebrate their graduation and be prepared to their transition after graduation?
Perhaps the answer lies in better understanding why we’ll plan for months and years for minute-long events but not for those that last much longer than our attention spans can handle. Could we take our focus on 3-minute events and expand it to, for example, a child’s first 3 months of life or the first 3 years of a child’s formal schooling? Imagine the difference that could make.