Finding common ground by looking up at the sky

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

It’s a week old, ancient history in today’s fast-paced, frantically frenetic world. And it’s superfluous, too. What’s a rainbow anyway but the sun’s rays distilled into colorful arcs? Nothing magical or newsworthy about this. It’s science. It happens.

And yet, Saturday’s rainbow must have worked some magic because it cast a spell. “Go outside and look up at the sky,” my daughter texted. “There’s the most beautiful rainbow.”

I was with my friend, Maureen. We were in the middle of googling something that seemed important at the time, but we didn’t hesitate. A rainbow? Out the door we flew.

Other people stopped what they were doing, too. I saw this on my street when walkers and joggers paused to look up. And I learned this later when photos of rainbows popped up on Facebook and Twitter and on the evening news. Even my texts and e-mails were all about the rainbow. Imagine? For a little while on a Saturday afternoon in late September 2021, prisms of light united many of us in a way that nothing has for a long, long time. We had a shared experience that was positive.

We need more shared experiences, more rainbows. “Look! There’s a rainbow!” And everyone’s eyes turn to the sky. No one says, “Don’t tell me where to look!” No one stands around objecting to the order of the colors or in which direction the rainbow leans. No one says, “I want more yellow.” “That blue is not right.” “Red is aggressive. See how it’s pushing its way into orange.” “I hate the arc. I want a square.” “Why can’t all the colors just blend?”

I’ve been thinking about this. About how divided we are about every little thing right now and how we need to pause and begin to seek out all the things we share. How we need a reset. How we need to find our common ground. Common ground is possible. We found some in the sky last Saturday.

Maureen, who was out the door in a flash, saw a double rainbow. I didn’t. I was just seconds behind her but I missed the moment. She explained the significance of that double rainbow. She said that 13 years ago, on the afternoon of her 15-year-old daughter’s wake, there had been a beautiful double rainbow and that people paying their respects told her this. That every one of them said this was Lisa’s way of saying she was OK, Lisa’s way of saying she was better than OK.

I didn’t realize when Maureen was telling me this story that Saturday was not just the day a rainbow bloomed over Boston, but that it was also National Daughters Day. Maureen didn’t know this either until the next morning when a friend posted a picture of her own daughter with a rainbow. It was then that Maureen put it together: She had seen a double rainbow not on just any random day but on a specific day, National Daughters Day. And she understood why.

When I was a child, every time I saw a rainbow I went in search of the promised pot of gold at its end. But a rainbow has no end. I know this now. Rainbows are circles. But because of the horizon, we can’t see the whole of them unless we are above the earth flying in a plane. Not many of us have experienced this.

It’s the same with people. We never see the whole of a human being. We see parts. We see that someone’s tall or short, old or young, smart or not so smart, funny, serious, Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative. We see religions and nationalities and ethnicities. And we see faults, too. We see when someone’s rude, impatient, insensitive, arrogant, selfish, above the law, mean.

But we don’t see all of people because we can’t, because we are as hampered by our horizons as rainbows are hampered by theirs.

We look at rainbows in wonder. We always have. All through the centuries. All over the world. Last week’s rainbow not only connected Maureen with her daughter. It connected all of us and was a gentle reminder of how good, despite our differences, coming together feels.