After the Fire

After the Fire

A meditation on the courage to remain warm in a world that gives us every reason to become cold.

I have noticed that, after spending time with people I care about, I am often left with a quiet sense of happiness. Not exhilaration. Nothing dramatic has happened. No great problem has been solved, and no revelation has descended from the heavens. I simply return home feeling a little lighter than I did before. Their company has done me good.

I felt this recently after an evening spent around a fire. There had been the familiar things: the smoke that follows you wherever you stand, the patient business of tending the fire, plates passed from hand to hand, familiar voices crossing over one another, and laughter appearing without anyone having to work very hard for it. Later, the fire began to settle. The conversations drew to their natural conclusions. People said goodbye and went their separate ways. But the warmth of the gathering did not disappear when the last person left. Some of it came home with me.

There are moments in life that announce their importance while they are happening. Weddings, funerals, births, departures. We know that we are meant to pay attention to them. But much of what makes a life good does not arrive with such ceremony. It comes quietly. It stands around a fire holding a drink. It tells an old story that everyone has already heard. It asks whether you have eaten enough. It laughs at something that will not seem especially funny when repeated the next day.

Perhaps wisdom consists, in part, of learning to recognise these ordinary moments before they have become memories.

It is easy to tell ourselves that there will be another fire, another conversation, another evening together. Often there will be. But the existence of tomorrow should not make today seem inexhaustible. One day, without our knowing which day it was, a familiar gathering will have happened for the last time in precisely that form. Someone will move away. A friendship will change. A chair will stand empty and, for a while, we may still make room for the person who once sat there. But every fire must eventually go out. This need not make us morbid. It should make us attentive.

If being with someone leaves us happier, perhaps we should notice that happiness while it is still warm. Perhaps we should even tell them.

And yet people are often strangely afraid of showing genuine affection. We worry about how it will be received, what it might imply, or how we might be perceived. We take a clean and generous feeling and submit it to a committee of imaginary observers. Is this too earnest? Too sentimental? Will someone think me foolish? So we disguise affection as a joke, dilute it with irony, or keep it to ourselves.

But who gains from this?

Certainly not the person holding back warmth that might have brightened the life of another. And certainly not the person who might have needed to hear that they are valued, that their presence matters, or simply that somebody was glad to see them. Something good was available to be given, and fear persuaded us to leave it ungiven.

I enjoy wit. Irony has its uses. Both can bring delight, and both can help us endure things that might otherwise be unbearable. But they make poor permanent guards of the heart. There comes a point when armour worn for protection begins to prevent movement. It is absurd to keep wearing armour at the dinner table.

Armour is necessary only where there is something that can be wounded. To care for people is to leave some part of ourselves uncovered. Their company can bring us joy because their absence could bring us pain. The two truths cannot be completely separated. If we want to become incapable of grief, we must also become incapable of attachment. If we wish never to be wounded, we must make ourselves unreachable.

That seems a miserable bargain.

What would we gain by sitting beside the fire and caring less? Should we laugh less so that grief has fewer handles? Should we refuse to say, “I am glad you are here,” because one day the person may not be? The possibility of loss does not make present happiness foolish. It makes it precious. The places where life may wound us are often the same places through which its warmth enters.

There may be people who scorn affection expressed in earnest. Perhaps life has taught them to distrust tenderness, or to meet sincerity with a smirk before it has the chance to embarrass them. Life can, after all, be cruel and unfair. We ought to feel compassion for the wounds that produced such armour. But compassion does not require us to wear the same armour. We can understand another person’s defensiveness without surrendering our own capacity for warmth.

Affection is not diminished because somebody laughs at it. A hand extended in friendship remains a hand extended in friendship, regardless of who is watching.

Let the wounds life gives you neither prevent you from showing affection nor teach you to scorn it when it is offered. Receive warmth without interrogating it. Give it without first asking whether it makes you appear sophisticated. If you are glad to have seen someone, say so. If you care about them, allow that care to become visible.

Perhaps it will occasionally be awkward. Perhaps you will misjudge the moment. Perhaps someone will not know how to respond. These are small risks. The greater risk is that we become so concerned with appearing invulnerable that the people we love never learn how much they truly mean to us.

One of the advantages of growing older is that I feel less obliged to apologise for warmth. I no longer see much profit in standing at a distance from my own heart, ready to laugh at it before anyone else can. If affection makes me look foolish, then so be it. Better to be a fool who does some good than a cynic who sacrifices warmth for safety.

Every fire must eventually go out. The food is eaten. The voices fall silent. The smoke settles into our clothes, and the coals fade from orange to grey. We gather the plates, close the doors, and return to our separate lives.

But something can remain after the fire.

There is the knowledge that, for a few ordinary hours, we were together. There is the quiet happiness carried home. There is the recognition that these people matter to us, and that this is not a weakness to conceal but a truth worth honouring.

May we notice such warmth while it is present. May we be brave enough to give it expression. And when a good evening ends, may we not allow embarrassment to silence the simplest and most honest thing we could say:

I am glad you are in my life.

— Stephen D. Jones

Contende ut, sicut in caelo, ita et in terra sit.

Strive so that, as it is in Heaven, so it may also be on Earth.

#Stoicism #ModernPhilosophy #Warmth #Courage #PhilosophyOfClay