Embers to Flames
The fire we feed gets bigger. Whether it be a fire of trust, of fear, doubts. Of hatred, kindness, humility. The fire of desire. The fire of detest. The fire of descent into agony or the fire of ascent out of it.
And there comes a point that we need to realise just how much of a catalyst our very own mind is to this fire scenario in our life.
There is a proverb which says "what a man thinketh, so is he." And how true. However we define ourselves, however we steer ourselves - this is what we become and where we end up. When we perpetuate situations, the situations turn from embers to flames. The glory of this is that it not only applies to negative situations, but the greatest situations imaginable.
We have a fear of novel thoughts. Thoughts that don't quite fit in with the current status quo of life. We acknowledge they're embers, but we have a fear of them turning into flames lest they engulf the comfort of our current way of being. But God only knows how great it could be to challenge our lesser, more basic acclimatisations, and we should consider the fork in the road carefully because the fire can be provoked and increased and equally it can be extinguished.
We are tested by daily attitudes of others, firm humility of strangers, of friends. We watch the people around us change, engulfed by flames of both positive and negative situations and equally extinguishing positive and negative fires. But our problem remains in that we think of ourselves as the end all and be all: "what's true for you isn't true for me", or "I can handle this even though they can't". We acknowledge our fallible nature but then moments later go back to the attitude of "I can do whatever." Oh but if we were weary of the fact that flames can become untamed, and we lose control of the little fire that we built because "oh it felt good", the embers and sparks being caught by a wind that we never did have control of, and now we tremble.
Friends there is a duality in the human experience. When we think one thing, we should be willing to consider the alternatives to it. We're not the top of the apex though every moment our nature tells us to think of ourselves that way. A "what's in it for me?" attitude has swept across humanity, infiltrating our every action, and it causes us to cast aside and not even take one moment to consider the struggle of a fellow human being. A friend. A family member. A neighbour. A loved one.
In the words of Ice Cube: check yourself before you wreck yourself. But also, check yourself before you wreck others. Take caution with those embers, encourage the flames that are wholly considerably true to your wellbeing and the wellbeing of others by considering the other point of view willingly and wholeheartedly. Discard the selfish and harken to the self-less.
The mind is a catalyst for the best and worst flames.
Flames of warmth but also destruction.
