In Control?

I'm listening to the rain. It's drawing my mind back to days where I actually took time to stop and listen to it.

Once in Virginia I was leaned up against a white wooden fence watching a thunderhead press up against the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was July 3rd. I just sat there, gazing at the dark cloud lined in a thin grayish white steam, ignoring one of the nursing home resident's pleas for me to come back inside.

As I stood there, I checking to make sure I was shorter than and far enough from the surrounding trees to avoid being struck, looking back just in time to see a lightning bolt cut a jagged path. I watched it connect with a grove of trees. There was a strange anticipating silence. Then, faintly, I heard the sound of a breaking branch, followed by one of the the loudest waves of sound and emotion I had felt in a long time. My body moved from a sense of serene calm to immense fear as the wall hit me.

Aside from the thought that I might mess my pants, I felt small.

In a moment this lightning strike changed my perspective on existence and the universe. Whatever I planned to do could straightway be checked by some random act of nature's amoral violence.

I have some friends who lost their mother this way. She was walking back to the house with a trash can when on a clear day. Her life ended in a flash. This woman had cooked me a meal two months prior.

We tend to think we control our circumstance, like we have things figured out. Even if we feel limited, we at least feel in control of our immediate surroundings. It turns out even our mastery of taking out the trash is subject to something frighteningly more powerful than we are.