Around fire, time works differently
I didn’t know fire can bend time at will. And this is how it cheats us.
Friends-
I don’t much remember the times I was around fire. But I do remember the times when I wasn’t.
What about you?
The one time I really needed fire, everything was dark.
I was in a cave in the European Alps. It was supposed to be well-lit. Except that day, there were sections that were not. This was pre-cell phones. So I didn’t have the phone light handy.
The way in was small.
I don’t really get claustrophobic. But this one scared me. It was close to noon. So I was just ready to get away from it.
The first thing I remember when I stepped in, was relief.
But then something changed.
I don’t know if it was the fact that the path got more narrow as you go deeper. Or if it was just the weight of the dark. But it must’ve been forty minutes or so of darkness. Following me around like death’s door.
I’ve been in the dark before, of course.
But complete darkness?
It’s like seeing light-years into space. And still *not* knowing where the hell you are in the universe.
Near my face, though, it just felt like something blew frost down the little hairs on my neck.
I really should’ve brought a flashlight. So stupid.
But I don’t know if the flashlight would’ve mattered. Seeing the cold ahead of me—just wasn’t going to help. This was the first time in twenty something years that I wanted a torch. Not that I’d know how to use it.
But still, I wanted it.
And then, there it was. Light. Better yet—heat.
More of it. Thank goodness. Until it was bright enough. At least for me to remember that an exhale is real.
The dark is blind to time
Coming out of pitch darkness, everything burned.
You really had to shut your eyes tight to deal. And even then, the sun still hurt my eyelids. And there’s nothing I could do to stop it.
When I could finally look at the time, I noticed something odd. It wasn’t the forty minute journey that I thought I took.
It was only seven minutes.
Wait … What!?
I just felt—cheated.
As if I had put in hard time, and the world just shrugged and go: No, you didn’t.
I didn’t know that …
Fire doesn’t really follow the analog rules of time. It’s more like:
Fire—or its absence—can bend time.
The changing character of time …
… is obvious around fire and light.
It can take two minutes to start a fire. It could also take two hours. Just ask anyone who ever had to start a fire from scratch. Like a National Geographic adventurer I chatted with here.
It can also feel like fire just decides when to start. With a little help from us.
But if we look deeply, time and all scientific jargon aside:
Fire’s job is to heat. Ours, is to keep it going.
This is true in that cave.
And it’s true in broad daylight.
It’s true thousands of years ago.
And it’s true today at lunch.
In America. Worldwide, too.
I love fire.
But I think I love it more now that I understand its changing character against time.
I hope this means you and I can all choose how to start and burn—in our own time.
-Thalia
Next:
The language that gets you in practically anywhere.
Earning the lethal trust of one of the most private groups in the world
-Thalia
Time dilation is a real experience, and I’ve noticed it in many natural settings, being around fire among them.
It might be more accurate to say that fire bends our perception of time. I wonder if we intuit that a fire is not a static thing, but a process, and that its continual unfolding before us is just one representation (in a very fast and vivid way) of the same coming and going energy in everything. By contrast, everything else around us seems slower and less intense, including time.
I find that being in nature — truly immersed in any natural surroundings — erases my concerns about time. I’m not trying to do anything in particular, so there’s no pressure to view time as a resource that I need to hoard or manage or optimize in anyway.
They say time flies when you’re having fun. I suppose one way to interpret that is that it flits away when we’re enjoying something, no longer sitting on our shoulder and squawking in our ear as if we might lose it if we stop paying attention to it. We have all the time we can ever have right now.
Thank you for taking the time to inspire all of us to reflect on that very fluid element flowing through our lives.
And so what was the situation behind being in this cave, why the darkness, and was anyone else with you?
This is a lot of why I love camping, especially in the backcountry. Time just flies very differently. And you feel how deeply it’s connected to space, since both indigenous people and physicists know, there’s no such thing as absolutist time, only spacetime and other such multidimensional concepts with feedback effects—like light and heat. I touched on some of these ideas in the first entry I wrote about a month ago, a 2-parter about backpacking into the rainforest and up to a Glacier in Olympic National Park, if you fancy a read, should be pretty easy to find on my page since I only have a few entries so far.