Lightning Strike

The Creative Potential of Polarities

We live in strange, strained times. Sometimes it seems that everything and everyone is changing so quickly we can’t predict what will come next. It’s hard to chart a wise course in such troubled waters, and I believe that this is one reason our culture has become polarized. But we aren’t passive participants in this experience of polarization; we have created it ourselves. Tell me if this scenario feels familiar: the more uncertain I feel my future is, the more I take refuge in the familiar and the safe. The more I insulate myself from the unknown, the more I fear it. The next thing I know, I have nothing to say to my brother-in-law at the next family reunion because he and I can’t talk about whether it’s okay to buy styrofoam plates to serve dinner. Some take it as a foregone conclusion that polarization is bad, but I’d like to interrogate that conclusion. What is polarization, after all? 

I grew up in Southern California, where thunderstorms are few and far between. One summer, my intrepid mother and her sister took all their children still living at home on a three-week, cross-country Church history tour, camping all the way across the continent. It was epic. One of my most memorable experiences on that trip was watching the awesome power of a midwestern thunderstorm cross over us in the middle of the night. It was amazing, and then scary. I ended up in the van trying to sleep. But I couldn’t, of course. Over and over again the lighting shattered my vision as it illuminated the billowing clouds and cracked across the sky. Thunder growled continuously.

Lightning strikes because the turbulent, churning environment of a storm cloud causes electrons to get ripped from molecules. Usually, negatively charged electrons balance the positively charged protons within an atom or molecule, leaving the molecule overall neutral. But electrons are fickle, and they can move amongst different molecules under the right circumstances. The storm cloud is one such circumstance. The wild interplay of water droplets and temperature differentials causes a storm cloud to accumulate electrons at the base, creating a negatively charged field at the bottom of the storm cloud and a positively charged field at the top. Normally, the negatively charged electrons would be attracted to the positively charged field and would move to create a neutral environment once again, but the insulating properties of the atmosphere prevent the two fields from coming into contact with each other. Compare the storm cloud before and after the formation of the charged fields. One difference is that the storm cloud is more organized. What? An organized storm cloud? But yes! That’s one way of describing it. Organization is one way of storing energy, so this organized storm cloud is actually full of potential energy, just like a coiled spring, or a roller coaster car at the top of the track. As the storm builds, the difference between the negatively charged field and the positively charged field grows greater and greater. Finally, when the pressure of this difference is enough to overcome the insulating effects of the atmosphere, electrons arc from one space to the next, and boom—lightning. All that potential energy has been discharged.