Felix Baumgartner captured the world’s attention when he free fell to Earth from 39 kilometres above it. At least, he had our attention for a moment.
“This is going to be one of those times that you remember where you were when it happened,” said a friend. He watched it on cable television while I followed it on Twitter. I wasn’t in any one place and, frankly, I don’t remember where I was when he landed.
Baumgartner’s jump is not a where-were-you-when moment. These moments are the turning points of our lives – the split second in time that helps us put everything into perspective.
“One of the things that makes these moments so powerful is that they’re unexpected. You’re going about your day and then – kapow – your life changes and you’re in that state where you know things are going to be different, but you don’t know how yet,” says Michael Camp, professor of journalism at St Thomas University.
Without prompting, he launches into the story of where he was when the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11th, 2001 occurred. Camp was at work, in the CBC newsroom.
“The first plane went in and I had that horrible disaster feeling, but when the second plane crashed into the tower, I realized that life was going to be different – and it’s true.”
Before asking for his expertise, I rattled off several events I thought might have been his life-changing split second. I referenced John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and 9-11. I had others in my arsenal, like the fall of the Berlin Wall. Camp surprised me. His moments are the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
“Bobby Kennedy stood for everything I believed in. Love, peace, racial equality, an end to war in Vietnam, the war on poverty – every good cause, I associated with this guy. He was so dynamic. He was so inspiring. Life would have been so different had he lived,” says Camp.
***
Between 1970 and 2001, it’s hard to define any moment that devastated the Western world so much as the assassinations of ideological figureheads, or the annihilation of the world’s most famous office buildings, and the lives within their walls.
I’m almost embarrassed by the depth of feeling Camp expresses, because my moment seems to pale in comparison.
When I was seven years old, my role model and hero died. She was more beautiful than any woman I’d seen in real life, more charitable than Mother Theresa in my eyes, and more glamorous than even Grace Kelly could hope to be. On Aug. 31, 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, died. To the rest of the world, she may have seemed a diva, a victim or a silly celebrity. To my family, dominated by women, she was “Princess Di,” a strong female role model who escaped a difficult marriage and blossomed on her own.
The next day when I heard the news, I was at my grandmother’s house, and saw my mother cry for the first time. This taught me several important lessons. Apparently, my mother was no more a superhero than the princess was, bad things happen to good people, and when someone dies, the rest of the world has no choice but to go on living.
Maybe my generation most often cites 9-11 as their “moment” for lack of other significant developments in our lifetime. There’s a sentiment that we’ve grown up in a world full of gloom, without the hope felt by children of the 1960s or 70s, without shiny new ideas to latch onto.
I asked some friends about their experiences and their own moments. Each 20-something had a different experience.
“Joe Carter hitting the World Series-winning home run” was one new father’s reply to my Facebook query. A young woman I had grown up with posted: “Saku Koivu’s first game back after being diagnosed with non-hodgkins lymphoma!”
Now this was new. I tried to explain to her that maybe she wasn’t understanding my question. I was looking for moments that changed your life. But she stuck to her guns.
“Yep,” she wrote, “that one game changed the course of my life. But no joke, it’s the thing that started my hockey obsession, leading me to commerce and where I am now.” This is a young woman who has dreamt almost her entire life of being the general manager of the Montreal Canadiens. While the event seems insignificant to many people in the world, it’s almost impossible to deny the effect it had on her. So is this lack of collective experience an individual issue or a generational slump?
“You don’t have that moment where the sun was shining and all things were bright,” says Camp.
But I think we do. I think we all grew up, to some extent, with the inherent light of children. I’m not sure I quite understood how Diana was any different from Belle or Cinderella. I dreamed not of being a princess, like her, but certainly of helping people in the same way. I didn’t know she had loads of cash and handlers and stylists to put together those beautifully tailored outfits. I had hope that maybe those children she held while she smiled serenely at the camera would have better lives. After her death, though, my idealism shone a little less brightly.
Moments will do that.
***
Though Michael Camp’s world changed when his heroes passed, and my seven-year-old life was a little more tarnished than before, we may not be remembering our moments exactly as they happened.
Psychologists call our recollections of big moments “flashbulb memory.” This term explains why we can remember where we were when we heard about the first plane hitting the Twin Towers but can’t recall what we had for dinner Friday night.
“What you see in the flashbulb is what is really there,” says Douglas Vipond, psychology professor at St Thomas University. Or at least, that’s what we used to believe.
Researchers in the 1970s found flashbulb memory to be highly accurate compared to most other types of memory, which Vipond describes as “leaky and creative.”
For 30 years, flashbulb memory has been a hot topic among researchers. Fortunately for them and unfortunately for the rest of us, there have been several disasters and game-changing moments to examine.
After the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, a team of researchers jumped into action. Vipond says they spoke to people about where they were when they heard about the explosion, what they were doing, and how they felt. One respondent told his story the day after the tragedy. The next year, his story was completely different.
This doesn’t mean the respondent was lying. It just means his memories are skewed based on his emotional reaction and, possibly, the input of others.
“They interview people the day after something happens and a year later, and two years later, and they compare the accounts,” explains Vipond. This lends greater credibility to new research, especially when contrasted with the research of the 1970s. The studies back then were conducted several years after memories were made. It’s impossible to know if the person is remembering correctly.
Ask anyone about the moment their life changed and they will undoubtedly recount an interesting story. It will be chock-full of interesting details, perhaps right down to the colour of their shirt and whether or not they were having a good hair day. The individual will truly believe all these details to be true. But there is a great possibility they are wrong.
Perhaps this inaccuracy and confusion can be extended to our memories of the time preceding and following our moments. We rehearse and replay in our minds the time around the life-changing event. Emotion clouds these memories and inevitably changes them, too.
Early flashbulb researchers noted “that the more consequential the event, the more rehearsal it receives,” according to Cognitive Psychology: Applying The Science of the Mind, by Bridget and Gregory Robinson Riegler.
We perceive 9/11 to be hugely consequential. It certainly was emotional. So would any of us really remember exactly what happened if there hadn’t been video cameras there to record it? It’s difficult to say.
***
One thing we know for sure: There has been a marked decline in moments that have shocked and horrified the collective consciousness in the last few decades. Past generations had the Kennedys. They had the first man on the moon. They even had Martin Luther King Jr. And they had access to them only from a few television channels. Now, when an event occurs, we’re hit with it from all directions: Twitter, Facebook, CNN. We’re no longer huddled with our families on the sofa, staring at a single television screen.
Now, some people in their 20s cite sports moments as ones that changed their life. They talk of 9/11, yes, but they also talk about the death of Osama Bin Laden. The experiences and opinions and memories of this new generation are so varied, it’s hard to tell we’ve lived through the same era.
“I think there are lots of moments waiting to happen. I think a lot of things are reaching their tipping point,” says Michael Camp. “There could be a flu pandemic, there could be starvation issues beyond all reckoning in places like sub-Saharan Africa.”
But could any of these events or circumstances impact every person in the world the way the death of a Kennedy could?
When the leaders of the 20th century were killed, the dreams of our parents died along with them. I don’t know if my generation, or even my children’s generation, will experience another moment so jarring it takes our breath away, tarnishes our shine.
Maybe there have been fewer dream-crushing moments. Or maybe we’ve just stopped dreaming.
