When Thunder Is Theater and Lightning Is a Mirror
Lightning illuminates the courtyard in stroboscopic flashes while I sit mesmerized by the kitchen window, watching nature perform its most violent poetry. Thunder shakes the building’s bones, rain strikes glass like desperate prayers, and I feel profound peace watching destruction from my warm, dry sanctuary.
But suggest I walk outside during this same storm, and terror arrives immediately. The romantic becomes dangerous. The beautiful becomes threatening. The same electrical display that enchants from inside would terrify from outside.
Why does proximity transform wonder into fear?
From behind glass, storms become theater—magnificent displays of power that entertain rather than endanger. We can appreciate the aesthetic without experiencing the consequence, enjoy the drama without risking the damage. The window creates perfect psychological distance: close enough for engagement, far enough for safety.
This is the central paradox of human appreciation: we love intensity from protected positions, crave excitement without vulnerability, want to witness power while remaining powerful ourselves.
“Dekho ki shundor brishti!” Happy calls out. Look at this beautiful rain! But when she needs to visit the market, the same rain becomes inconvenience, obstacle, source of complaint. Beauty depends entirely on whether we have to survive it.
The storm outside represents everything we find simultaneously attractive and terrifying about uncontrolled forces: passion, anger, natural power, emotional intensity, the aspects of existence that can transform or destroy depending on our relationship to them.
We admire storms because they represent freedom from human restraint—pure expression without social filtering, energy released according to physics rather than politeness. They do what we can’t: respond to pressure without considering consequences, express intensity without apologizing.
But we fear them because they represent our own ungoverned forces. The lightning outside mirrors the lightning inside—sudden flashes of anger, unexpected eruptions of grief, electrical moments when our careful emotional management systems fail and we become temporarily dangerous to ourselves and others.
The window between us and storm is really the boundary between control and chaos, between the managed life we construct and the wild forces that could unmake it. We love watching others experience what we’re too afraid to experience ourselves.
“Ami baire jete parbo na,” I say, watching horizontal rain punish everything exposed. I can’t go outside. But the truth is more complex: I don’t want to trade my position as observer for the vulnerability of participant.
From inside, I can appreciate the storm’s honesty—the way it expresses exactly what it feels without concern for social appropriateness. From outside, that same honesty would force me to respond with equal authenticity, to match intensity with intensity rather than hiding behind comfortable detachment.
Maybe this is why we love storms from inside: they give us permission to feel intensely while remaining physically safe. The external drama justifies internal drama. The lightning outside explains the electricity inside. The thunder provides soundtrack for emotions we usually keep quiet.
But there’s profound limitation in only loving intensity from protected positions. We become connoisseurs of experiences we never have, experts on forces we never face directly. We develop appetite for wildness while maintaining lifestyle of control.
The rain is ending now. Tomorrow will bring clear skies and the return of ordinary weather that demands ordinary responses. I’ll venture outside safely, having enjoyed the storm without surviving it.
But something in me wonders: what would happen if I walked outside during the next storm? Not to be reckless, but to stop loving intensity only from positions of safety, to experience rather than observe the forces I find beautiful only when they can’t touch me?
Some beauty can only be appreciated from distance. Other beauty reveals itself only to those brave enough to close the gap between witness and participant, to love storms not just from inside, but from inside the storm itself.
