Rekindle

An analogy:

I was walking out in the cold for a very long time when I came upon a fire. It was a godsend, because I'd been out in the cold so long that I don't honestly believe I would've made it another mile without it. As soon as it warmed me, it flickered out, leaving behind a few smoldering embers. I gathered them up and tried to relight it.

I'm no boy scout. I know nothing about lighting fires, except the stuff I see in movies. This half-knowledge almost worked. I'd see it growing a little and then it'd just go back out. Nothing motivates a person like "almost" doing something. I don't care if it's video games, building a card house or just trying something no one has accomplished before. If you "almost" do something, then you won't rest until you succeed at it. That's what happened with me and this little fire.

There was also the feeling that I came across this fire for a reason. Maybe I'm the "Keeper of the Fire!" Maybe I'm supposed to make a torch with the flame and carry it with me to light the night. I didn't know. I just knew that the fire was burning fine when I came across it and it went out while I was sitting next to it. Maybe I felt guilty like I inadvertently did something or didn't do something that caused it to go out. Whatever the reason, I refused to rest until I lit it.

If this were a movie, then this would be the part where they'd play a humorous montage of me trying to relight the fire a bunch of different ways. It became an obsession. I had other things that I should've been doing, but none of that mattered anymore. Hell, I'd even forgotten where it was that I was headed when I came across the darn thing. I figured out early on that external forces (rain, the elements, etc) made it really difficult to kindle a fire, so I built a shelter around it. Before long, I'd decorated this shelter and started calling it home. In short, I lost myself in it.

Years went by. I accepted that I might never relight that damned thing, but I was too heavily invested now to leave. Where would I go? Would it even be better than what I had here? This place was comfy. It'd be a lot warmer if I could get the fire to light, but it was still home. I felt safe and secure here. All of my memories were here. Who knows what's out there. I know "bad" and this place wasn't it by a long shot. So screw the fire! I was gonna try one last time and then call it quits. Fire or no fire, I'm home.

I took whatever fuel sources I had left and set them all up in the pit. It was all or nothing this time. I placed the last of the embers and emptied my lungs. There was smoke at first. Then nothing. I wasn't even disappointed. Deep down I knew it wouldn't work, but out of nowhere came more smoke followed by...FIRE.

I did it!
I re-lit the fire!

I can't describe that moment. Everything happened so fast. I watched the flame grow higher and brighter than I remembered it. Before I could bask in it, before I could celebrate the fact that this fire represented what's possible if you just don't give up, before I could do any of that I had to run...away.

You see, when I came across the fire it was burning by itself. I put a shelter up to make it easier for me to relight it. I built a home around it to nurture and care for it, but I never considered what an uncontrollable open flame would do to all of those things once it sprang back to life. It burned my house down. And it did it quickly. There was no time to salvage anything. All I could do was to get out, and even with that I still got burned. The pain is fading, but it left a scar that will take a long time to heal.

I told this story to someone not too long ago who asked, "Well, did you even try to put it out?" The answer is, "of course not." As much as I loved my house--Hell, I built it from the ground up with the expectation that I'd live there forever--the thing that I gave my heart and a third of my life to wasn't building a house, it was relighting that fire. Now I know that I wasn't the "Keeper of the Fire" after all, so maybe I am supposed to take a small piece of it with me as a torch and finish walking wherever it was that I was headed to begin with.

I guess it all depends on how you look at it. The cool thing about torches.......They're warm. They make it a lot easier to see where you're going in the dark, and they make it very easy to start a new fire.

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