There Is Thunder Already, When Does the Rain Come?

Someone stands in the middle of the room, a finger moving from one place to the next. This person has not done it. That one did not finish. This should have been done yesterday. If you had given that to me it would not have come to this. The sentences roll on, they sound reasonable, sharp, enough to make a few heads nod. And the desk in front of them is still a mess, the glass still sitting at the edge, their own share of the work untouched. Sometimes I wonder why the thunder in a room always arrives faster than the rain. Thunder needs one mouth and a few minutes of irritation. Rain needs time, needs effort, needs somebody willing to bend down and finish the thing. The distance between the two looks short, from lips to hands, and plenty of people never make the trip.

Thunder has a pull of its own. It gives the speaker the feeling of taking part, of caring, even of carrying the hardest part. Naming what is wrong with a task sometimes gives a pleasure close to having fixed it. Pointing out that someone else is slow makes you feel fast. Criticising a leaking roof makes you feel the hammer already in your hand. And the mind quietly enters the words on the credit side of the ledger, even though not one drop has fallen out there. That is where the trap is. It is not that people are deliberately lazy. Often they have simply mistaken sound for movement. A long discussion, a few well-placed complaints, an analysis that hangs together nicely, and inside you feel as tired as if you had done something big. The tiredness is genuine. It is only a pity that the ground is still dry.

Out in the world, thunder has many voices. The irritated one: how is something this simple still not finished? The weary one: I have said it a hundred times and nobody does anything. And the softer one that lingers like drizzle: this person is irresponsible, that one is not perceptive, the situation is not favourable, the weather is not helping. Too hot, cannot work. Too cold, leave it for tomorrow. Too hungry, no strength. Too full, sleepy. The first two sound like reasons, and by the third a slightly embarrassing truth shows through: anyone who wants to avoid something can sew a raincoat out of any scrap of cloth. Put it on and stand there dry, watching other people wade. And with a little more skill, point out to them where the water is deepest. I say this quietly, because that coat is not rare. Most of the time it is already hanging up inside each of our heads.

The opposite of thunder is the people who bring rain and make little noise. They are not necessarily faster, better or more noble. They simply begin. The chair is crooked, so they straighten it. The line is wrong, so they fix it. The call is awkward, so they dial the number. The task is unclear, so they ask until it is clear and then keep plodding along. Watching them is often unremarkable, because real action does not know how to pose. It is clumsy, slow, sometimes done two or three times over. A rainstorm does not fall to a speech either. One drop hits the tin roof, the next pools on the veranda, another lands right in the basin someone put out. Scattered like that, and after a while the yard is wet. Work is the same. It does not need to announce its usefulness. You look up and the desk is clear, things are moving, someone else has room to carry on. Rain does not compete with thunder. Rain only falls.