I decided to watch the thunderstorm today.

I haven’t done that in a while.

It’s very sad how during the year I’m so busy with school and work I really don’t have time to smell the roses. But today was Sunday, and there was nothing to do that couldn’t be pushed off, so I went out into the backyard to watch the thunderstorm.

I think thunderstorms are beautiful.

The brief, jagged slashes of light that are so beautiful are caused by differences in electric potential between clouds. The lightning balances the electric charges by transferring electrons from one point to another. It’s just static electricity on a large scale. And yet so pretty. The thunder is the sonic boom that comes from the rapid movement of matter faster than the speed of sound.

Science aside, there’s nothing more pleasant than relaxing under a tree or on a porch watching the rain pour down and the lightning flash while listening to the rumble and crash of thunder. It’s idyllic, pleasant, relaxing, and conducive to thought.

I didn’t always enjoy thunderstorms. Like most children, I found them frightening. When I was quite young, I used to wake up and read the entire Shema from fear. Usually it took me until the storm was over, which made me feel that my prayers were answered.

It wasn’t the lightning that frightened me. It was the thunder. The loud noise. The crashing, booming, banging, like dishes falling onto a stone floor and shattering into a million pieces.

Then I learned what lightning and thunder are. I learned that the frightening part is the lightning. The thunder does nothing. And I realized that it was foolish to be afraid of the thunder. And so, from then on, during storms, I kept telling myself to be frightened of the lighting, not the thunder. It didn’t work; I never did become frightened of lightning, but I eventually lost my fear of thunder.

Sitting under the tree watching the storm, it occurred to me that I’m often frightened of the wrong thing in life. The noise and rumble make me feel timid while I pay little attention to the impending bolt of disaster.

Large, authoritative people intimidate me. I don’t deal well with important bosses. Once I get the idea that someone is important, I feel relatively insignificant, and I shrink from bothering them with my questions. And forget about the bosses who cultivate the imposing, authoritarian air. I positively shrink in their presence.

It’s wrong, it’s unhealthy, and it often makes me forget what I really should be frightened of: failing in my duties. Because when you’re loath to ask a question when you’re uncertain or wave a red flag when something is wrong, things just snowball until disaster strikes.

I could come up with a dozen examples of this from my life, but one stands out as truly disastrous. I wish I could say it taught me the lesson, but it didn’t. Every circumstance is different, and it’s only afterwards that I can clearly say, “I was stupid, stupid, stupidly intimidated.”

I was hired and trained as pool operator for a local day camp. This means I was sent to an expensive, government-required course to learn all aspects of managing a swimming pool, which ostensibly should have made me an expert on all the problems related to swimming pools. So I felt I should be perfectly capable of managing the pools myself without trouble.

Well, nothing works like in the textbook. In the textbook they say if the chlorine reading is bright pink, it’s too high; if it’s pale or colorless, it’s too low. They don’t tell you what to do if, after you drop in the tab, the liquid briefly flashes bright pink, then becomes colorless, and the tab develops bright pink spots and refuses to dissolve. What does that mean? I had no idea. I knew the small wading pools smelled funny, but at the course they’d said the “swimming pool” smell usually comes from too little chlorine – the scent is caused by the ammonia formed when there isn’t enough chlorine to clean the pool properly. This was supported by the colorless chlorine test results. And yet, my intuition, my nose, and my pump system told me there was plenty of chlorine in the pool – possibly too much.

I was totally stumped. What I would have liked to do was empty the pool and experiment with the filter and chlorinator system, but the Big Boss was adamant that every child must swim every day, and any request to shut down the wading pools would surely be refused. Besides, she didn’t take me seriously, pool-operator course or not. As far as she was concerned, I was a 20-year-old child, not to be trusted. She was bound to treat any such “expert” recommendation from me as irritating bumptiousness.

So I didn’t ask.

Bad move. One piece of wisdom I’ve learned: always put the ball in the boss’s court when it comes to things like that. This way, when things go wrong, it’s not your fault.

Because the day arrived when a child stepped out of the wading pool with reddish marks all over. The chlorine level was way too high and it burned his skin. They hosed him and all the other children down, but the Big Boss still had to deal with a furious mother and a threatened health inspection. It turned out the pump was too strong for the small pool and was pumping chlorine too fast even at the lowest level. Only by diluting a water sample four times could I reach a level low enough to get results on the chlorine test. I was so far in the doghouse I was just short of being thrown out of the establishment. The only thing that stopped them was that nobody else had the required pool operator certificate.

I cried for three nights straight because I realized that I should have been more assertive. If I hadn’t been intimidated by the Big Boss, I would have insisted that the pools be shut down and monitored. Then no child would have gotten hurt. Then the boss wouldn’t have been confirmed in her belief that I wasn’t mature enough for the job. And then I’d still have my self-respect. But no – I’d cowered from the thunder, and been hit by the lighting.

Perhaps I should follow the model that worked for me as a child. If I just keep reminding myself that the lightning is the frightening part, eventually I’ll stop being afraid of the thunder.