People Are Like Firewood

People are like firewood.

Friends, let me reassure you that I’m not here to bring back the Burning Times. It’s just a metaphor that occurred to me while building a campfire this holiday weekend, out at Camp 50/50, an undisclosed location in the Appalachian foothills.

Humanity understands fire pretty well. Our ancestors were working with it before they qualified as Homo sapiens. Chemists understand it thoroughly, and can precisely engineer flames from a cigarette lighter to a home heating boiler to a blast furnace…as long as those flames are gas or oil.

Wood is another matter. Each piece of wood — especially when making a campfire out of fallen branches and twigs, but even with split firewood — is cussedly individual.

The only way to precisely engineer a wood fire is to pelletize the wood, to crush and grind and homogenize it.

Short of that, each piece of wood is unique, and building and maintaining a fire from those pieces takes at least as much art as engineering.

We’ll never know the history — the conditions that made the tree grow as it did, the precise environment that shaped it, why the branch got bent as it did, why it fell from the tree or why the tree itself fell. But if we wish to make them burn, we have to recognize that individuality. We have to respond to how each piece takes fire uniquely, keep adjusting it, give it both warmth (from other pieces of wood) and air (from space between pieces).

It’s just like people.

If you want to inspire people, set them aflame with some passion, you have to recognize that individuality. Yes, there are those who would like to take the pelletization approach, to crush and grind and homogenize human beings to make them more manageable, but fortunately that brave new world has not yet arrived and we still have a decent chance of avoiding it.

You have to respond to how each person is shaped by their experience. You will likely never know the history of that shaping, but you have to recognize it, figure out how each person can fit into the “fire” of the whole, to be given the warmth and air to make them shine.

You can’t engineer them. You can’t standardize them. You can’t make grand plans far ahead of time for them. You can’t shape them like clay, or pour them into a mold.

It’s a process of continual adjustment and response. And that takes actually looking and seeing the individual unique human being, not some identarian caricature or political affiliation.