Electric Aliveness: Why Storms Wake Us
Lightning splits the night and I feel more awake than I have in weeks. Every cell responds to the electricity in the air, as if my nervous system recognizes kindred energy and starts humming in harmony with atmospheric chaos.
But yesterday’s perfectly calm weather left me feeling hollow, disconnected, like something essential had been drained from existence.
Why do I feel most alive when the world feels most dangerous?
Presence Through Urgency
Storms create presence through urgency. When lightning threatens and thunder shakes windows, awareness sharpens immediately. Every sense heightens. The body remembers it’s a biological system embedded in larger systems, vulnerable to forces beyond control.
Calm weather provides no such reminders. Clear skies offer no reason to pay attention, no atmospheric drama to match against internal aliveness. The nervous system, evolved for scanning danger and opportunity, finds nothing to engage with during prolonged stability.
Our biology was shaped by threats. The ancestor who stayed alert during storms survived to pass on those genes. The one who relaxed completely during calm weather might have missed the predator using that calm to hunt. We carry neural architecture designed for vigilance, and it activates most fully when conditions warrant it.
Modern life inverts this relationship. We’ve eliminated most genuine dangers while maintaining constant low-level stress. The nervous system stays partially activated by manufactured anxieties—deadlines, notifications, social pressures—without ever fully engaging with real environmental forces. We’re alert to everything trivial and numb to everything significant.
The Permission of Chaos
“Ei raat e ghum ashbe na,” I tell Happy as storm approaches. Sleep won’t come tonight. But it’s not anxiety keeping me awake—it’s electricity. The same energy that moves through clouds moves through consciousness. Storm nights access vitality that peaceful nights somehow suppress.
There’s profound relief in weather that mirrors the internal turbulence we usually have to hide. Social norms demand calm presentation, emotional control, peaceful interaction. But storms give permission for intensity, for responding to atmospheric chaos with matching internal chaos.
During calm weather, any expression of internal intensity feels inappropriate. If I’m restless during peaceful evenings, something must be wrong with me. The environment suggests tranquility; my failure to feel tranquil becomes personal deficiency.
But during storms, intensity is environmentally appropriate. My heightened state matches the heightened atmosphere. The internal electricity finds external validation. I’m not disordered—I’m responding accurately to actual conditions.
This permission matters more than we acknowledge. So much of modern life involves suppressing authentic responses to maintain social smoothness. We dampen excitement, moderate enthusiasm, contain energy that might disturb others’ calm. The accumulated suppression creates deadness we mistake for peace.
Storms temporarily lift that requirement. When the world is chaotic, internal chaos becomes reasonable response rather than social violation.
The Electrical Nature
Maybe the deadness during calm weather isn’t lack of stimulation—it’s the burden of maintaining artificial tranquility when our systems crave authentic engagement with powerful forces.
We are electrical beings. Neural signals are electrical. Heartbeats are electrical. Cellular processes involve constant electrical exchanges. But we live mostly insulated from larger electrical phenomena—indoors, grounded, separated from atmospheric electricity by walls and wiring and careful engineering.
Storm nights breach that insulation. Lightning nearby creates electromagnetic fields we can actually sense, even if unconsciously. The air’s electrical charge changes measurably. Barometric pressure shifts affect our bodies directly. These aren’t mystical connections—they’re physical responses to physical conditions.
The aliveness I feel during storms might be my electrical system recognizing and resonating with larger electrical forces. The same way a guitar string vibrates when another string plays the same note, my nervous system responds to atmospheric electricity with sympathetic activation.
Calm weather provides no such resonance. The electrical environment stays stable, offering nothing for my electrical system to engage with. The result is the hollow feeling—not absence of stimulation but absence of the right kind of stimulation.
The Scale of Forces
Tonight the storm provides what calm days cannot: reminder that we’re electrical beings in electrical universe, that aliveness requires engagement with energies larger than our carefully managed daily routines.
There’s something existentially satisfying about encountering forces that dwarf human scale. The lightning doesn’t care about my preferences. The thunder won’t lower its volume for my comfort. The storm operates according to atmospheric physics completely indifferent to human concerns.
This indifference is the gift. It reminds me that I’m participant in systems vastly larger than myself, subject to forces I can’t control or negotiate with. The reminder is oddly relieving—it puts daily concerns in perspective, reveals them as the small-scale dramas they actually are.
Calm weather lacks this perspective correction. Without powerful forces making themselves obvious, it’s easy to fall into the illusion that human-scale concerns are the largest things happening. Work deadlines feel cosmic. Social tensions feel world-ending. Personal anxieties consume all available attention.
The storm interrupts this narcissistic focus. It says: here are forces that actually matter, energies operating at scales that reduce your concerns to their proper size. Your anxiety about tomorrow’s meeting means nothing to the lightning. Your social worries don’t register against the thunder.
The Vitality Question
But this raises uncomfortable question: if I feel most alive during conditions that objectively threaten wellbeing, what does that say about the life I’ve constructed during safe, calm times?
Maybe it reveals that safety, pursued beyond a certain point, becomes its own threat. Not to survival but to vitality. The over-managed life eliminates not just dangers but the engagement with powerful forces that makes consciousness feel worthwhile.
We’ve created environments so controlled that nothing significant can happen to us—and nothing significant can happen through us. The price of comprehensive safety is comprehensive dullness. We survive but barely feel alive.
The storm temporarily restores that feeling because it reintroduces genuine risk, authentic power, forces that matter independently of human permission. For those hours, I’m not managing a life—I’m living in a world.
Tomorrow the calm will return. The storm will pass. I’ll go back to feeling hollow, disconnected, waiting for the next atmospheric chaos to wake me again.
Unless I can find ways to engage with powerful forces during calm weather. Not manufactured drama or artificial intensity, but authentic encounters with energies larger than my carefully controlled routines.
The storm is teaching. The question is whether I’ll remember the lesson when the skies clear.
