Commentary: A new pen pal in Sweden asked me to describe summers where I live; and fittingly, as I set to describing New Mexico’smonsoon season, we are seeing a delightful August thunderstorm.
Driving toward the Mimbres Valley, I watch bolts of lightning through dark curtains miles ahead. Arriving in the rain I recognize by smell one of those cleansing storms, that began with gusts of dirt, clouds, and then rainfall that lingers, but not for too long. The lightning and thunder put on a merry show as I write in dim light.
My children mock me by sleeping through this thunder without stirring. At their age I would have taken to the basement in fright. I had terrible anxiety about thunderstorms, in large part because through uncanny chance I was, over three years of my northeastern childhood, witness to four lightning strikes that made contact with the ground or trees near me.
I was close enough to hear the snap of the electric charge, to smell it and feel the blow of the thunder in my belly. Hail Zeus.
My father comforted me one afternoon as I sat in the kitchen fretting over a thunderstorm that had come over the Narragansett Bay and was going door to door looking for me. He tried to imbue me with a statistical perspective, assuring me the odds of being anywhere near a lightning strike were slim to none.
As the period at the end of his sentence, there was a tremendous explosion as a bolt of lightning split open a tree by our side of the house. We sat at attention for a moment, as you do when a bomb goes off nearby. Finally, my father said, “Well! I’ve got nothing more to say about that,” and strolled to a safe distance from his doomed child.
Later, he would tell me that moment reminded him of a long night he once spent underneath an army jeep in Vietnam while his camp was being mortared.
Being the man he was, he distracted himself and passed time trying to calculate the odds of being hit by one of these rounds, at the rate they were coming down. The math suggested he was decently safe walking around, but it did not make him feel better under that jeep, not one bit. Factual information seldom dispels fear or sense of risk.
Years later, I sat by a different window as a storm roiled overhead, perched on a meditation cushion and paying attention while joulescrackled and my worry waxed and waned.
Decades of zen practice have helped me face mayhem with an attitude similar, perhaps, to what Jacques Barzun described as “spirited pessimism.”
“Life confronts all but the most obtuse with a set of impossible demands,” wrote Barzun, a man who watched the world of his childhood collapse in the wrath of World War I. “It is an action to be performed without rehearsal or respite; it is a confused spectacle to be sorted out and charted; it is a mystery, not indeed to be solved, but to be restated according to some vision, however imperfect. These demands bear down with redoubled force in times of decay and deconstruction, because guiding customs and conventions are in disarray.”
Ours is also a time of erosion, mistrust, blundering and permanent loss. More frequently now, people I chat with disclose a sensation of tilt, of incoherence. The perception cannot be reasoned away, yet why should it be?
Our best hope may be for mayhem to open us up, that we may regard life and human value with infectious clarity and appreciation.