Consider a candle, it’s relaxing, isn’t it? I find it incredibly relaxing and I don’t know a single person that would say otherwise. I’m thinking candles by the bath side, a candlelight dinner. The light that it exudes is warming, pleasing, it’s way more satisfying than a strip light in a hotel room. There are meditations in yoga that involve staring at a candle. There’s a property to it that soothes, and relaxes. Why might that be?
Perhaps it is that the candle is always constant, it fluctuates slightly; it flickers, but it won’t go out in most cases, unless there’s an extreme circumstance like you accidentally tip a load of bathwater over it, or a big gust of wind happens. That slight fluctuation can help us because it mirrors a state that we feel comfortable in — the slight fluctuation, or the small steps that we all take in life. However, it’s not that natural.
It’s constant because we as humans designed it that way. The invention of the candle was a very practical invention, before we could simply flick a switch and light up our homes they needed to be lit by candlelight. A big industry was developed to provide the oil to keep the candles burning constantly at night: the whaling industry.
Consider a bonfire, a miraculous thing, also a human invention but somehow more magical than a candle; more wild, and inspirational.
Could that be because it’s part of a process?
Human beings love to consider themselves as finished objects: “I am who I am”, “I don’t like that”, “my lower back always hurts”. When in actual fact we are living organisms full of processes on a micro-level. The only reason we seem like an object is our perception of our body from our mind. Perceptions that are built up over time become easier to use — Joe Dispenza, a neuroscientist, uses the phrase:
“Neurones that fire together wire together.”
Every time you use a particular way of thinking you create nerual pathways in your brain. However, we all have this function of our brain called neural plasticity which allows us to change these pathways for other pathways. This allowed our evolution as a species. The slight confusion to this is that we can decide to create pathways in our brain, around processes in our thinking, that don’t turn out to be so good for us. The more we think in certain ways, the more likely it is that’ll be revert to that way of thinking next time. This can lead to demotivation through low self-esteem.
A philosopher and physicist Raymond Tallis defines meaning as something inherently static; we need borders to able to define something as a thing and that can be said of a person too but those things fluctuate and change over time. It makes us feel better to define something as immoveable; an object. We’ve sought to build a world of these immovable objects, these meanings. I’d argue that even our ideology of materialism is born from this and the objectification we see of people as well. We seem to be much happier to define something as an object because it makes sense to us. Man’s search for meaning.
If we return to the fire metaphor, the bonfire shows this life cycle. From the start — in the interests of environmental sustainability, when you spark some flint into dry moss, it lights very easily. Then the structure of the bonfire is such that each size and density of wood is easily caught by the expanding fire. It’s a magical process, because it’s so logical as well as elemental.
Too often in our minds, we’re trying to create a roaring bonfire out of a spark, and modern day marketing certainly encourages us to do that. In fact, it encourages us to be that roaring bonfire at all times, which will only lead to burnout.
One of my favorite parts of a bonfire is embers at the end. Glowing, sparkling, and white hot. The end of a process can be as beautiful as the start, or the roaring middle. It’s partially the visual aspect but I also believe that it is this way because the process is closing; we call it the ‘dying embers’, we know that the fire will soon be gone.
The people that have experienced the whole process with you may now be sitting at staring philosophically into the embers and sighing comfortingly. Having a bonfire is a shared experience and that builds connection.
It’s this elemental process that helps us to make sense of processes in our lives, either micro — like thinking processes, or macro — like our own deaths or the death of a loved one.
I love the old wisdom that says that the seeds of life are in death, and it’s natural, as I stare into the embers of the fire for my thoughts to wander to what i’m going to be doing next, either practically like getting in the car to go home, but also it prompts me to think about the next stages of my own life; it gives me inspiration.
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Previously published on Medium.com.
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Photo credit: Marc Ignacio on Unsplash