Lightning Never Strikes Twice

Phil Burpee, Columnist

Phil Burpee

I saw a guy once on TV who said he'd always wanted to play the piano but could never get past first base - until one day he was out walking and got struck by a lightning bolt - ZZZAAAP! - right on the top of the head. He'd flipped like a shot gopher and piled down onto the ground with smoke coming out of his ears, feeling for all the world, he said, as though he'd stuck his finger in the big outlet at the bottom of the Grand Coulee Dam. He should have been dead, of course, considering that there's about sixty or seventy million volts of current generated by the average blast of lightning, but all he felt was a weird sort of disembodied tingling rippling all around him as he stared up at the big, blue yonder looming over him like some invisible dragon. "Where the hell did that come from?" he wondered through the daze. He dragged himself to his feet and noticed with some chagrin that the soles of his shoes were crisped and hanging off like bits of dry bacon. Oddly, his feet seemed fine. He tossed the remains of the shoes in the bushes and made his way home, a little teetery, but relatively stable under the circumstances. When he got in to the house he quickly self-prescribed about four fingers of Jack Daniels and flopped onto the bed for a twelve hour reorientation of his addled brain cells - a deep and dreamless sleep ensued.

The next day he woke up with an unfamiliar sense of mission. The top of his head was a bit numb, and if he hadn't have been bald, he was pretty sure his hair would have been well curled. He went over and grabbed the Yellow Pages and looked up piano teachers. He phoned one up and said he'd like to learn. She gave him an appointment the next day. When he walked into her studio he felt a great attraction to the piano sitting over by the window. He explained that he didn't know how to play but had always wanted to. "Sit down," she said. He did. "Make some sounds," she said. He did, and the sensation was like driving a car in the desert with the windows down. His fingers felt their way up and down the keyboard making random chords and arpeggios. It was unnervingly familiar, as though it had been waiting for him these many years - an old friend long departed to some distant land. "Well," said the piano teacher. "You've got some aptitude there. Let's set you some exercises and tap in to some music."

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Over the next weeks and months the fellow advanced quickly in his pursuit, and before too long became a quite proficient player. "Damnedest thing," he would say. "Till that bolt outta the blue knocked me silly, a piano was just a piece of dead wood for me - couldn't get a rise out of it at all. Now it's like I grew up with it and it's the most natural thing imaginable for me to play. What the hell - go figure - go figure that."

What does it take to awaken a person to his or her true nature? How do we get to that place where we rev on the things that make us truly alive? Where do we find access to the passions that bring us to the well to drink and drink? Does it take a lightning bolt to shake loose the misperceptions of who we are and what we may or may not do? Can our self-perceptions become prisons, locking us away behind bars of mediocrity, regret and abandoned dreams? Do we bury the bright visions of our childhood in compromise and sensibleness? Must we be satisfied with vicarious pleasures, always believing that it is for others to manifest beauty?

It is often said by the finest musicians and artists and poets, and indeed the most insightful physicists and chemists and mathematicians, that the melodies or the numbers or the images are not created, imagined or invented by the person. Rather the song, or the idea, already exists out there in the ether - and it is waiting for access to the world. The musician, say, must make of himself a journeyman, ply his tools, create the space within which the notes might come. When he has made of himself a suitably worthy vessel, only then will the strains descend - and then if the work is done well, torrents of exquisite sound may come amongst us, and then we may say that this is music, and that we are hearing the sounds of the cosmos.

But hey - remember this one? -

This guy's on the operating table and just about to go under the anaesthetic for a quite serious heart operation. He grabs the surgeon's arm'-

"Doc - give it to me straight - will I be able to play the piano when it's over?"

The surgeon replies - "Of course, there's no reason at all why not."

"Wow!" the guy says - "That's great! - I never could play the damn thing before."

That's a cheesy old joke, but it's a nice one. It's about magic and the suspension of disbelief. Of course this guy's not going to be able to play the piano after he wakes up as far as this goofy gag goes, but it seems the man who got hit by lightning had his blinkers blown off and he ended up with a different view of things. His head came apart for a nano-second or so, and when it reassembled he found himself in a different place - he found himself now to be a channel through which the music of the spheres might freely flow. He found a voice which previously he could not even rightly imagine. He stepped into the timeless river and was whisked away on the great pulse of things. And he became, along the way, that much more whole. How strangely beautiful.

Author and social anthropologist Joseph Campbell speaks of 'following your bliss' - gravitating to those things that best allow you to become fully alive and true to your innate spirit. To do otherwise is to condemn yourself to shoulda-coulda-woulda beens, and to deny the world the exhilaration and evolutionary benefit of a human being operating at full potential. We get funnelled into pragmatic and 'cog-in-the-wheel' drudgery and forget what it means to be charged with the crackling electricity of living. The absolute pinnacle of this abrogation is the current flood of Reality TV shows, whereby the viewers are asked to suspend all pretence to fulfillment and rather become slack-jawed voyeurs, feasting at the hog-trough of passing celebrity and cheap titillation. We are taught to live through others, even as we wither to our own true selves.

There used to be a poster around of some little boys on a football field with their pads and gear on, standing around in a circle. In the middle was a kid with his helmet off, kneeling down, playing his violin. All the other guys were listening. The caption read - 'Celebrate the whole boy.' The idea was this - be everything you can be, not just what is traditionally expected of you. Be a fleet-footed wide-receiver and hard as a rock, but also be that sacred vessel within which can pour the elixir of sweet serenade.

Bolts can strike out of the blue. Lives can be transformed. But it is said that lightning never strikes twice. Seize the day. That which we put aside as mere wishful thinking might be the very tonic that opens our eyes and our hearts. The thing that we dream of floats just beyond our grasp, awaiting the shock of realization that it was always at hand. We do not discover it - we just finally notice it. Perhaps a lightning bolt is extreme medicine - perhaps it is simply a matter of looking around, and seeing for once the beautiful instrument waiting there at the window for us to come sit down and play. And it's been waiting all the while.

"It is good to know our universe. What is new is only new to us." - Pearl S. Buck

Phil Burpee

June 9, 2012