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Shaant
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What Surviving Lightning — Twice — Taught Me About Fate and Perspective
Lessons in luck and vulnerability from the truly statistically impossible
Photo by Dre Erwin on Unsplash
The first time lightning struck the ground near me, the sky went white.
The sound saturated not only the air, but my chest, my bones, my skull.
For a moment, I thought my body had exploded and left pieces of me everywhere.
Then I took a breath, realized I was whole, and still living.
The second time, years later, I had no excuse for being naive.
I recognized the air was getting metallic, the tiny hair on my arms stood at attention, and the weight of silence was near unbearable.
When the strike landed so close, I could taste electricity on my tongue.
Again, nothing. No burns, no broken bones, no heart that stopped.
Zero injuries.
People say lightning never strikes twice.
I’m a rare example of being struck twice, and I still can’t explain why.
The likelihood of surviving once was something like 1 in 186,000.
To survive a second time, only to have a story to tell, feels somewhere between divine comedy and cruel cosmic joke.
For me, it became both a burden and a gift.
The body remembers what the mind wants to forget
Survival is not always a clean business.
Sure, I left with no physical scars, although my body held memory in other, stranger ways.
I flinched at loud cracks of thunder. I felt a rush of static on my skin long before the storm had originated, like my nerves and body were practicing the impact.
If I was feeling courageous, I would sometimes replay the flash inside my head at night. And it did not matter that I had not been hurt; my chest still tightened.
I later read that when lightning strikes, the majority of the current travels outside the body, right over wet skin. It does not go deep into your body or into your heart like the stories say.
The skin effect, some call it.
Maybe I got away with it because I was in the rain. Maybe I got away with it because of sweat. Maybe the bolt, ultimately, chose the earth over my blood.
Science told me the stories, but none answered the question that mattered most and that haunted me all the same.
Why me, why me, twice?
Friends have always joked that I’d been either unlucky or chosen.
At drinks on one occasion, someone laughed and said, “You ought to buy a lottery ticket, man. If you could beat those odds, money should be no object.”
But I don’t have that kind of luck.
It feels more like a reminder that I am walking around with an invisible shelf life. I just don’t know when my stamp will run out.
Strange gifts from impossible odds
Following the second strike, fear was quickly replaced with perspective.
I began to realize how flimsy everything is. Safely watching storms from the window, I would see how small we are from a sky that can change in a second.
I would walk down the dark streets, hearing the hum of the power lines, and think about how much of our life is based on forces we don’t even think about.
But surviving was oddly also a confidence booster.
The little fears started to lose their power over me when I’d faced something that should have killed me.
Presenting at work, navigating an argument in a relationship, moving abroad. All of those things began to feel really small in comparison to standing in front of something capable of ending me in an instant.
If I was not taken out by lightning, I certainly wasn’t going to let the everyday anxieties of life own me.
I even started taking bits of these lessons to others.
I told friends who enjoyed hiking not to ever be the highest point in an open field. I told them about the tingling hair on my neck and the metallic taste, the warnings from Mother Nature.
I shared that storms do not care about your plans and that sometimes, to survive, you have to get over yourself and crouch low in the mud.
They were simply not safety rules to me anymore. They were things I knew in my skin.
Fate, vulnerability, and what remains
Being struck by lightning twice didn’t give me any clear answers about destiny.
I don’t think I was spared for some grand purpose.
What it did give me was humility.
The strikes took away any idea that life is predictable or deserved. They helped me understand that survival is often random. Another day of life is not a testament to strength, but happenstance.
And still, that understanding didn’t leave me hopeless.
Rather, it made me softer. Kinder.
Knowing how thin that line between life and death can be means you stop only measuring people based on their choices. You can see how much of everyone’s story is subject to things they didn’t choose.
The storm that came too soon. The wrong place at the wrong second. The miracle nobody else saw. And so on.
As a 30-year-old Indian male who has experienced despair in poverty, despair in migration, and now this absurdity of becoming a part of the chaos of lightning, I don’t ask, why does life keep saving me?
I no longer engage in that thought.
I now ask, what can I do with the time I’m given?
If storms come again, maybe they will take me.
Until then, I want to live like someone who knows every breath is borrowed.
The storm passed but its lesson stayed
I don’t think lightning altered my destiny.
It altered my perspective.
Twice, I survived when I shouldn’t have. Twice, the universe let me remember that survival is fragile and precious.
The sky chose not to end me.
Life has only ever been on lease.
What Surviving Lightning — Twice — Taught Me About Fate and Perspective was originally published in The New Outdoors on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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