Bernard O'Shea: I have a burning desire for Mick to light my fire

With all the distractions and technology serving our brains with endless dopamine, I asked myself the question. Why do we still stare at fires?

Bernard O'Shea: Me and the kids just stared at fire, sitting on the couch, occasionally speaking for a good quarter of an hour. It was a short historic moment in our house.

Last week when the weather was awful, our heating decided it was broken. I’m humanising the boiler these days. I call him Mick. I ask him daily, “Mick, please don’t stop working because the radiators get air locked.” He never replies. It is a fact of life. When you need something to work, it won’t.

I have the same relationship with Google maps. It will tell me regularly that I need to leave the house for a pickup and that traffic is light. But when I’m stuck in the middle of nowhere trying to find the quickest way home, it decides then to tell me that I’m in the middle of a field and there’s no way out. A no signal area is today’s equivalent of being stranded on a desert island.

On the day the boiler (Mick) decided to down tools, I prayed. I even Googled the patron saint of boilers. The nearest I could get was Saint Eligius, the Patron Saint of heat. I want to think that Eligius spoke to Mick and said: “Mick, please provide the heat for the O’Shea’s,” unfortunately, my prayers were unheard. Luckily, we still have a fireplace, so at least the option of lighting a fire was still on the cards.

Our fireplace is right beside the main TV in the house. I asked the kids did they want to help me light the fire, but they were only interested in Netflix. They get transfixed by their programs. I often feel guilty about letting them watch TV, but it does not touch the amount I watched growing up.

We only had two channels, and I would easily say that I watched eight to ten hours of telly a day as a kid. I’d watch anything. I watched The Angelus, The News, The Weather. I remember watching an Australian soap called The Sullivans with my granny. I can remember that it was a grey program with many Australians saying things like “This is awful” or “When will you be back?” I even watched the national anthem at night, and after that, I could gaze away at the Aertel pages for hours on end.

But it’s the gaze that gets me. My kids are transfixed on the screen. I remember my Granny telling me, “Stop gawking at that yoke” as a kid. But that’s what I did. I just zoned out and stared hours on end like a hypnotized pleb.

I eventually chopped up a few sticks in the wind and the rain—something I hadn’t done in a decade. 

There’s nothing like chopping wood to make you feel like a proper outdoors person. 

There’s also nothing like the pain when one of the sticks flies back off the axe and whacks you in the shin, making you feel like you are a timid house pet.

Eventually, I got the fire going. The two eldest just stared at it as it began to gather flames. In the same way, they were besotted with The Loud House, a program they have strongly affiliated with on Netflix.

Our six-year-old asked me a simple question that I couldn’t answer. 

“Dad, what is fire?” 

I told him, “It is what you see now in front of you."

“I know that, but what is it?”

I struggled and eventually said, “It’s what happens when something burns. It turns into something else and produces energy.” He got even more frustrated, “Yeah, but what is in it? What are its ingredients? What is it made up of?” 

My parents would rightly answer, “It’s magic,” or “I don’t know,” I told I would find out later for him, but by that stage, he and his sister were just as my granny would say “gawking” at the fire.

The three of us just stared at it, sitting on the couch, occasionally speaking for a good quarter of an hour. It was a short historic moment in our house. Usually, there is always noise. When the two boys go to bed at night, I can even hear them talking to each other in their sleep, and I’m sure my daughter gets allergic reactions to silence. But they sat just “gawking”.

Even with all the distractions and technology serving our brains with endless dopamine, I asked myself the question. Why do we stare at fires? 

The answer lies in cognitive evolution, along with providing a defence mechanism from predators for early humans and allowing us to get more quality REM sleep which in turn allowed us to develop larger brains, fire might also have improved our ability to think about many things at once and relate them to one another. This “working memory” is an essential trait for imagining and executing complicated plans. 

Psychologist Matt Rossano of Southeastern Louisiana University speculates that small social groups first achieved this altered mental state some 100,000 years ago around the campfire.”*

The hypothesis is that staring at a fire sends us into a meditative state. It allows us to rationalize our thoughts subconsciously. It’s like it provides a massage for our brains, a “time-out” almost.

I have in the past mocked those who put fires on the telly. I was that person who thought, “Just light a fire if you want a fire”. But if you are a person that watches the fire on your TV, you are ahead of the game and possibly more mindful and chilled out than myself.

The O’Sheas' mind massage lasted the duration of a firelog. The kids went back to watching The Loud House, and when they were finished “gawking” at the screen, they went on for the rest of the evening to replicate the cartoon around the living room. But for those fifteen minutes, the essential element of life itself, fire, wrestled their and my mind into an ancient meditation. For that, I have Mick to thank.

*https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/fire-good-make-human-inspiration-happen-132494650/