Woke this morning to the sound of thunder….how far off?

I laid there and wondered.

Just kidding…paraphrasing Bob Seger.  It’s never too early to paraphrase Bob Seger.

( Did you ever get a chance to notice what a good writer he is?  Some of his lyrics are like haikus or something.  But, typically,…I digress.)

The morning is a good time.  There’s that sweet spot where I know that I don’t have anywhere to be for a couple of minutes…and I can let my mind roam where it will.  No discipline in the thinking department at 5 in the morning….I can let “tornado mind” take over… and ride it out for a while.

This morning, I heard the thunder….and I was off to the races.

Before I knew it, I was thinking about those guys who do sound effects for the movies….foley artists…I think they’re called foley artists.

Anyway…when they needed to conjure up a close approximation of thunder, they used to shake a big piece of tin.  The shaking made the tin sound like thunder off in the distance.

Now, it’s probably a digital soundfile that is stored on a massive hard drive somewhere…nothing is as low-tech as shaking a piece of tin anymore.  Everything’s more realistic…but maybe not as real….it’s hard to say.

This made me think of how we become good at “shaking the tin” in our own lives.

We become good at presenting something that is an illusion as something that could damage or inconvenience us.

We shake that tin until the people around us are sure that it’s going to rain.  We shake the tin until we feel we need to duck under cover so that we don’t get hit by the next bolt of imaginary lightning.

It’s not hard for us to have faith that something bad just might be real.

( I listen to talk radio out on the route sometimes…there’s a lot of really good tin shakers on talk radio.  Fear must boost ratings.)

I don’t know why we’d be willing to shake the tin.  It’s hard to fathom why the pessimistic viewpoint seems to be the easiest one sometimes to arrive at.

Water flows downhill…maybe that’s what’s going on?  Maybe it’s just the easiest route to take…

“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”  Mark Twain

Good for you, Mark Twain.  I’m still working at taking that realization to heart.

I have enough trouble sometimes with what is really happening.  I have troubles with what I fear.

When I think about it, though…I really don’t have all that many troubles that I can think of at the moment.

And I must have too much “good stuff” piled on my sheet of tin to remember where I put it.

Even if I felt the need to shake it for a while.

 

(The YouTube video is 10 hours long…you don’t need to watch it all. )