To Build a Fire, Stand Back or Move In

My writing professor and mentor Jonathan Penner often shared a helpful analogy that has always stayed with me. He said that one kind of person builds a big fire and then stands far back from it. Another kind of person builds a small fire and moves in close to it. A good writer, he said, is like the second kind. I think I might add onto this: a great writer knows how to do both and when. 

This idea applies to many areas of life. There are times when we have to make a grand gesture or pour on effort, and the fruition of these larger endeavors has a through-line of intense focus and concentration. If it all looks like it's killing us, then we're probably fairly new at it, and not as controlled and efficient as we could be. If it looks effortless, it still might nearly kill us, but we did it with those terrific descriptors, aplomb and élan.

"Function in Disaster, Finish in Style" 
 -- unofficial motto of New York's Medeira School for Girls as described by alum Stockard Channing

Official motto: Make Haste Slowly

There have been many times when I have felt a bit desperate to solve a problem or to get unstuck, and kept gathering and stockpiling ideas, but did not really give them enough time or attention. Or I turned to past solutions that were no longer fitting and threw them on the fire for good measure, but thoughtlessly. 

In this mental or physical hyperactive state, I start to feel self-conscious, as if I'm being watched by the gods and they are laughing at my feeble humanity. My careless fire is growing and heat is spreading, but I am no closer to the meaningful and sustaining solution that I need. Its power self-combusts in graceless mini-explosions. I played with fire--just to be doing something, anything--and had simply generated a temporary bonfire that burned out quickly.

My personal firestorms usually aren't destructive on the surface. During a crisis, I'm usually in survival mode, so those conflagrations tend to be fueled with too much information, hope, anxiety, rigidity, casting about, faithlessness, panic, anger, indignation, despondency and helplessness, all while trying to keep it together. In other words, a hot mess of resolve without substance or strategy.

Sometimes I have had the great good fortune to have a person come into my heat zone, willing to help me contain it, to release me from all of my brain's cross-talk, and to guide me toward a good direction. These people all seem to be the kind that can step toward a big fire and see how it is really several small fires crowded together. They have moved in on these smaller fires many times and have experience tending to them. They know how to create breaks and walls, and they know what should be left alone until it dies down on its own.

What these merciful angels don't do is take charge. They aren't trying to stamp out all that is wrong, until my energy turns passive and ineffective. They just listen and stay with me until the containment is down to a hearth, one that I can move into closely, with consideration and experimentation until it is a lasting source of creative solutions.

One way to keep your heart's fire burning or "functioning in disaster", is to remember the generous and patient people who walked through the heat with you. As a part of following your passion, keep close the ones who help you tender your devotion to it as the necessary and skilled fellows they are. Your passion, if it is to be both good and for the good, deserves their helpful attention. As they assist you, you will learn from them how to "finish in style" and will be, in turn, a boon to others you come alongside.

Coincidentally, a former headmistress of the Madeira School for girls lives out the difference between devotion and obsession. Her passion for the doctor of The Scarsdale Diet fame becomes lurid and violent as she keeps throwing logs on the fire. Truth is stranger than pulp fiction.