Snug

Have you ever ducked inside your house or car just before the heavens let loose with an incredible thunderstorm?  You know the kind - with thunder so deep and rumbly that it shakes the windows.  Jagged bolts of lightning illuminate the sky for a split second and you see others scurrying to make it safely inside.  Rain comes in torrents.  Sideways, furiously, backing up storm drains and creating huge puddles and flooded viaducts.

Or perhaps you woke up one morning in February to a fierce wind blowing down the chimney flue and swirling around the attic.  As you look outside you only see snow coming down so hard that it's as if a gray fog had settled over your entire neighborhood and became three dimensional.  Branches covered with ice tap against the kitchen window while you start the tea kettle.  The weatherman on television warns ominously of sub-zero wind chill factors and caution us to stay inside if we can.

Remember how safe you felt within your shelter?  How somewhere from within, a primal sort of feeling was evoked - of being safe and warm and protected against the elements?  Whenever this happens to me, whether it's that feeling of safety against the fury of nature or something as basic as a flight or fight reaction to a confrontational circumstance, I am both reminded and reassured of how these elemental instincts bind us all together as brothers and sisters.  I marvel at how certain gut emotions and reactions are, for all practical purposes, out of our control - they are just a part of our hard wiring as humans.  

It can be the smallest things that connect us all, even though we seem light years apart in many other ways.  But the smallest things, I've found, can be cause for celebration and it has become one of the joys in my life to look for commonality among the people that seem  the most polar opposite to me.  A sort of game, you know?  And so far, when I put my mind to it, there hasn't been one person that I haven't been able to find some strand of a connection with if I really try.  Would you like to play?  Your turn...