Campfires & Wildfires: How To Distinguish, Manage, & Harness Our Own Personal Fires In Life

When we think of fire, what comes to mind? For most of us, fire is necessary for keeping warm, cooking food, and is an integral part of evening relaxation around the fireplace. For others, fire strikes fear because of its destructive potential to burn homes and their fondest memories to the ground or inflict personal harm when mishandled.

Nature has its own productive way of utilizing fires to refresh aging ecosystems. While we may view wildfires as destructive liabilities that can scorch hundreds of acres of land, nature uses wildfires to recycle nutrients, clear away the old, and open fresh opportunities for new organisms to establish themselves and thrive during their episode of life. Without fires, ecosystems risk becoming nutrient-deficient, leading to rundown terrestrial woodlands that suffer from decay.

Fire isn't inherently good or evil, but a tool for change. Metaphorically, fires reflect how we control change. We will explore fires as campfires vs. wildfires and learn what they mean to us.

Our journey will begin by differentiating these fires and highlighting why some wildfires may be more beneficial than we originally thought, whereas containing personal campfires will backfire on us.

Fires & Their Role In Driving Change

Fires represent powerful transformative agents of change in nature. Whether the change is for better or worse depends on our perspective on the fire's purpose. In general, fires ignite through combustion and will sustain themselves with the right mix of fuel, oxygen, and heat until the mixture becomes insufficient to sustain itself.

The heat generated from fires stems from a fuel source's converting rapidly from chemical potential energy into thermal energy. Heat dissipates into the environment through the path of least resistance.

According to the laws of thermodynamics, heat transfers from hot to cold environments until both environments converge to the same temperature, known as thermal equilibrium. When heat is generated in the wild, equilibrium is impossible since the air is a massive reservoir compared to the fire. Consequently, these fires can roam through nearly infinite space to heat up until they run out of fuel.

In addition to their utility, fires are visually captivating. When a fire occurs, its flames create their own dance and rhythm as they continue burning the material. The visual display of natural art has entranced the human imagination and curiosity.

Thanks to its unique abilities compared to other forces of nature, civilizations harnessed fire for developing tools, cooking food, and defending themselves from predators and enemies. As a result, we've engineered systems to capture and utilize fires to our advantage, starting early with campfires.

Campfires are contained fires ignited by campers as an essential element of the camping experience. Campfire heat is generated to boil water, cook food, and keep warm when the sun goes down. Aside from utility, campfires cast an intimate atmosphere for nocturnal entertainment, which includes creative storytelling, singing folk songs, and roaring in laughter.

In contrast, wildfires are expansive and uncontrolled fires that spread rapidly, engulfing large areas while consuming the fuel in sight. While no two wildfires are the same, they typically originate in densely wooded regions under dry conditions. Wildfires are ignited by natural causes such as dry lightning and human activities such as misuse of matches, overfilled campfires that spread outside their containment, and other mishaps.

While wildfires have destructive consequences associated with their presence, their occurrences are vital to reset the balance of living forces, usually in the form of ecosystem succession. When forests burn, they are not necessarily destroyed but transformed by creating violent molecular separations that return nutrients to nature. In other words, wildfires clear out the old and make room for the new.

How Fires Transform

When campfires are mismanaged, they spill outside their containment areas and catch nearby brush and debris on fire. Several influences that cause these transformations include ash and flames spread by the wind, campfires set up too close to other fuel sources, and human mismanagement of campfires during and after their use.

The most common source of human error that creates wildfires is not completely smothering campfires when leaving the area.

When campfires cross the threshold into wildfires, they become difficult or impossible to control unless there is a fire management plan with special equipment readily available to extinguish them before they spread any further.

Managing wildfires becomes a challenge for even the most seasoned of firefighters, but several strategies can be deployed to turn the odds in our favor:

1. Isolate the Fire: When wildfires are cornered and run out of fuel, they will burn themselves into oblivion.

2. Smothering: Firefighters can contain wildfires by dousing them with water, deploying oxygen-depriving materials such as foam or fire blankets, or clearing vegetation in the anticipated path of the fire.

3. Natural Solutions: Finally, when firefighters cannot manage the fire themselves, the best bet is for nature to severely dampen or extinguish wildfires with heavy rainstorms.

These strategies are often coupled and strategically aligned with the nature of the fire and the surrounding environment.

Fires As Control Factors In Our Lives

Physical fires are similar to their metaphorical counterparts. Not all events are so rampant that they become wildfires, but some are more difficult to control than expected.

We will associate campfires with events we can maintain and channel to make changes in our lives, whereas wildfires are events that are out of our control and usually the result of worry and misalignment of perception.

Making Campfires

Our own campfires manifest internal driving forces that motivate us to make changes to increase our chances of living better lives. These fires create the tension needed to tap into our passion and zest to seize the day. Because these fires are contained within us, we have full access to the energy they generate and can harness it to our own personal benefit.

We aren't limited to a single campfire; most of us have upwards of a dozen campfires in our lives that motivate us to make progress, no matter how big or small. For most people, family and personal relationships constitute most of their long-term campfires.

Outside of social campfires, we also have other motivations that challenge us to achieve more, such as work projects, hobbies that unlock different skill sets, and major life events: buying a home, getting married, going on a music tour, starting a business, etc.

Even though campfires are far easier to control, they need to be sustained at the right levels for them to be useful to us. Out of fear, some of us will not allow our own personal campfires to exceed a certain level of intensity.

Consequently, when our campfires are burning at an insufficient intensity, we face even greater risks that arise from inaction, including losing motivation, performing at subpar levels, or missing important deadlines.

While there are resources out there to help gauge whether we need an extra push, it's up to us to recognize when our own campfires are not strong enough and find ways to turn up the heat to an optimal level.

When Campfires Turn Into Wildfires

We have to be careful – some of us have a tendency to overcorrect our mistakes by pouring too much fuel on our fires. When we overcompensate, we risk turning a once-manageable campfire into a blazing wildfire that takes a life of its own.

Born from external forces and events, wildfires unleash their fury beyond our control, leaving us at the mercy of their unpredictable outcomes. The consequences of these fiery cataclysms can impact individuals and entire populations alike.

Due to the sheer uncertainty surrounding wildfires, we become fueled with apprehension as these wildfires lead us to anticipate the worst when they are revealed.

Consequently, we associate wildfires with an adversarial role solely to destroy what we spent years building and maintaining. Events that represent wildfires in our lives include a wildly fluctuating economy, crippling health problems, and political upsets, among a myriad of other personal fears.

When Wildfires Are Beneficial

However, there are instances when monumental blazes yield a net positive transformation in our lives.

Breakups with an abusive spouse or a toxic employer are perfect examples. We might initially feel scorched from our experience, but after a healing period, we rise from the ashes in a position to embrace newer, better opportunities.

When we successfully burn these toxic agents, we experience our own ecological succession initiated by the inferno that consumed the parts of our lives that no longer served us. By clearing out the old, we allow the new to grow, even though the growth will initially be slow.

Managing Our Own Fires

Campfires and wildfires don't have to be boring or scary. With the right management plan and tools, we can harness both to our advantage, living courageously and taking calculated risks that transform our lives for the better.

As we assess the array of tools and action steps available for effectively navigating our fires, we must recognize that not all fires require complete extinguishment. Furthermore, the approach to managing one fire may not necessarily apply to others in our lives.

Experience, context, and thoughtful planning are key to effectively managing our fires with the greatest likelihood of success.

The fires that ignite within our lives are potent forces with the potential to bring about desired transformations. Therefore, it is equally crucial to contemplate our response to these fires as it is to gauge the magnitude of the change they can induce.

To enhance our ability to manage our fires skillfully, we can consider the following action steps and management tools to develop a personal fire management plan. These resources will empower us to harness the potential inherent in our fires and make the most of these transformative experiences:

1 – Determine The Fire's Purpose

Every fire has a purpose. Accurately determining the fire's purpose is crucial to managing it appropriately.

There's nothing inherently wrong with having fires in our lives. Some exist to burn off toxic aspects of our lives and should be left alone, while others must be managed to work to our advantage.

Once the fire’s purpose is determined, we can manage it appropriately.

2 – Determine What Fuels The Fire

While natural fires are fueled by the combination of oxygen, a fuel source, and heat, our metaphorical fires have more fuel sources. The way to manage the fuel sources is not by seeing them but by recognizing their psychological power on our perceptions.

Personal fires fall under two main categories: intrinsic and extrinsic.

Intrinsic fuel sources involve something inside us that keeps us going in our lives. These motivations force us out of bed to start our day while providing grit to overcome life's challenges.

On the other hand, extrinsic motivators are influences that originate beyond ourselves. Our families, economic gain, and societal status are a few examples of extrinsic fuel sources for our personal fires.

3 – Manage The Fuel

Once the motivation for our fires is determined, we have some options to consider. We can add more fuel to make our fires bigger, maintain their supply to keep them consistent, or cut off fuel to reduce or terminate the fire.

For fires that make us better, it's natural to add more fuel or maintain a steady level of intensity. On the other hand, finding ways to starve harmful fires is critical to prevent them from further hindering our progress when they take away from our lives.

4 – Modify Fires To Fit Our Needs

Our lives have seasons where some fires burn brighter or dimmer than others, and that’s alright. No fire is meant to last forever. The longest-lasting fire in our solar system is projected to only last for 4 billion years––the sun.

What matters most is how responsive and thoughtful we are when we change the fire's intensity. Our circumstances are subject to change, and an intense fire that was once good for us may risk harm to the people we care about in a new stage of life.

Therefore, being mindful of our fires with respect to our changing circumstances is important to ensure they serve our desired purpose.

5 – Identify What Might Transform These Fires

If left unchecked, our campfires could transform into wildfires. Fires must be contained and free from proximity to undesired fuel sources. After all, preventative measures are the most effective at controlling problems.

While details of our circumstances are beyond our control, we can leverage the Pareto Principle, which highlights that 20% of fuel sources instigate 80% of our fires. It's easy to believe that everything has an equal pull when reality clearly shows that not all things are equal.

Once we identify the most important influences, we should carefully manage them. This is what expedites progress.

6 – Set Up Appropriate Containment

Fires consume and spread indefinitely unless guardrails are in place to contain them.

With real fires, removing additional fuel sources and cutting off paths for fires to connect with more food is usually the solution to managing the fires. Nothing is left to burn without access to more fuel, and the fire dies out as a result.

The best way to control our personal fires is to apply high levels of emotional intelligence. Our first step to control is to recognize our emotions, their triggers, and their potential consequences.

When we recognize these triggers, controlling our fires is far easier. Our personal fires rely on our emotions to feed them, and as soon as we control them, their intensity also comes under our control.

7 – Plan To Manage Our Fires

While every fire is fueled uniquely, maintaining a general plan to manage our fires allows us to respond to them before they get out of control. Even the most calm and collected individuals have a plan for themselves to maintain level-headedness in the midst of challenges.

Our plans don't need to be detailed to comply with the local fire marshal, but must be documented. When we document our plans, we become more invested in their outcomes. The writing becomes more realistic for us as we reprogram ourselves to control our personal fires.

One of the easiest plans to make is a simple If-Then Statement. Like computer programming languages, we read situations based on the conditions our senses pick up. If a condition is true, then we will respond with what we believe is best for us.

These If-Then Statements can initially be generic but should become more specific over time. Examples of solid if-then statements include:

• If I am nervous about my upcoming meeting, then I will take a deep breath and remember at least one positive contribution I can make to the meeting.

• If my boss gets on my nerves today, then I will breathe in, look up, and release my breath as I return to work.

• If I am driving in traffic and catch myself having road rage, then I will remember that most of these drivers will never be seen again and continue about my business.

Any If-Then Statements we make should reflect the true context of our problems.

8 – Reflect On Past Fires

We don’t need any raging wildfires in our lives right now to gain insights on managing them. Life is full of examples to draw upon and gain second-hand insights.

The best fires to reflect upon are our own, since we vividly remember the motions that these fires brought to our lives. This could be throwing a winning touchdown against a rival football team, winning a prestigious award, or narrowly losing a race, and how we felt afterward.

We’ve all experienced situations that unexpectedly became uncontrollable because something important was left unchecked. We cannot control everything that happens to us, but we can control how we respond.

Using the tools above, we can reflect on how we would adapt differently next time to improve our chances of creating our desired outcome.

9 – Watch How Others Manage Their Fires

Even better, we can analyze and determine good and bad approaches to managing our own fires through how others have done the same. As we analyze the fires of others, we need to remember that we will never be able to know all the facts in play, so we must approach our analysis with a high level of empathy.

The people directly around us are the easiest to analyze since we interact with them regularly. However, we have further access to how people behave through the internet and our favorite shows.

The people we analyze can be real or fictional. Most fiction has some basis in reality, so we shouldn't dismiss it because it didn't happen. All we need to do is glean insights into their victories and mishaps.

From there, we incorporate the lessons learned into our own ethos as we continue conditioning ourselves to respond to the personal fires in our own lives.

Let’s Manage Our Fires

Wildfires and campfires exist for two completely different purposes. Campfires are controllable forces we harness for utility and entertainment with friends and family, whereas wildfires dramatically transform the forest and give way to ecological succession.

We will always have campfires and wildfires to contend with in any season. Our campfires are the driving forces that push us to create beneficial changes in our lives as long as they have the right intensity and guardrails to keep them contained. Likewise, our wildfires exist to eradicate elements of our lives that could hold us back from achieving our goals.

So, what will you do differently to manage your campfires and wildfires?

Take a small step now, and you’ll notice that with the right approach, fires, big and small, are essential to making the changes needed to live a better life.