Starting a fire

This morning, I woke up to a snow-covered yard. The stack of firewood was blanketed in white, and I had to pry the frozen pieces off, one by one. It always takes me a bit to start a fire on the best of days: the stove has to warm up, the wood is not always completely dry, and, let’s face it, I’m far from fire-starting proficient. This morning I had just two pieces of dry wood. I stacked up several other snowy, wet, pieces on top of the stove to dry off at least a little bit before adding them to the growing embers. It took the better part of an hour to get it truly going.

The process of making a fire with less-than-dry wood makes me think of the ways in which we expect ourselves (and each other) to go from 0 to a 100 in a heartbeat. As I come out of 10 days of relative quiet, jumping straight into work feels jarring and almost impossible. I need time to dust off the snow, dry off the wet, warm up the wood and stones and metal. I need time to make my way from the immediate to the conceptual and, most importantly, to make the connection between the two.

When I was younger, my solution was never really to take time off. If I didn’t slow down, I’d never have to accelerate in this unhealthy fashion. Not that I was conscious about what I was doing: I just had this irrational, mostly unarticulated, fear that if I ever came to a complete stop, I might never get going again. When my daughter was a newborn, I read Kant and Nietzsche while breastfeeding and watched BBC News around the clock to prevent my brain from turning to baby-mush. I honestly think I would have done better to just chill. The brain adapts. I didn’t need to hear about those particular wars and that particular categorical imperative.

There is a balance, of course. We are of the world and in the world. This means being both in the snow and in the knowledge of wars. There is no one way to do that, let alone do it well.

But for me, at least, part of the process is learning to build an on-ramp to action: the time to dry off and breathe before firing up again. Knowing that it is OK to be slow, even as everything feels urgent. Building the awareness that slow now may be what we need to accelerate later.

My fire is roaring now. With several more soggy pieces of wood drying off on top. Everything is a process.