It’s Good to Set Forests on Fire
Every year, wildfire season carries a small piece of hell into our world.
One glass bottle, a careless campfire or a tossed cigarette can multiply its destruction ten thousand fold, swallowing acres and acres of land with its flame.
The land is charred black, the forest critters lose their breath, and homeowners are left to weep in front of their home’s black carcass.
It’s a tragedy for every kingdom of life.
And yet, earlier in the season, we see firefighters- both professionals and volunteers -ignite fires in the very forests they’re supposed to protect.
And protect they do.
The firefighters patrol the forest floor and use a driptorch to drizzle flaming petrol around. Within hours, small fires dot the horizon.
It’s not because they’re bored and need fires to put out for fun, but to prevent the hellish scenes from earlier.
The burning is controlled. Dead, dry shrubbery that piled up over the last few months is burnt away, meaning future fires have less to work with.
The fire cleanses too. Not in some weird, ritualistic sense, but in terms of the forest’s health, closer to your mum’s detox and renewal baths.
Nutrients trapped in the leaf litter are released into the soil, invasive species are killed off and sunlight is free to refresh the forest floor.
No longer is there a scraggy mess of dead wood. Young plants, previously suffocated, can thrive and a new wave of life pours through the forest.
But where will this colourful analogy land?
Your notes are the same, but in some sense, the opposite too.
At first, as you begin to forage the world for good ideas, your collection might get stale, or rather, begin like that.
With any topic, you’ll encounter the surface-level insights first. The boring, old-as-time fundamentals heard a million times over.
Personal trainers write “Progressive overload is key for muscle growth”
Self-improvement newbies remark how “Everyday habits compound over time”
And I write “Taking notes is important for good learning”
We know.
You have probably met these ideas a hundred times over.
And I don’t wish to discredit them with this piece -that’s not the point. It only makes sense that the fundamentals are repeated, reread, repeated and reread again.
It’s their truths which form the bedrock of any discipline.
But for you, the notetaker, the reader, the romantic scholar, I admit it can be boring.
You have to write them down though… it feels wrong to gloss over the basics and skip to the nitty gritty, so you do.
Just like the old forest, your early notes build up a stale understory -dry, painfully ordinary and in need of some energy.
Controlled burning renews the forest, but the opposite is true in your notes:
To add life, you add more.
You go the other direction.
Through sheer volume- and some careful organisation -you dig into the heart of a topic and push beyond the surface-level thinking.
More notes mean more connections, and not just the obvious ones. With every new idea you add, there’s a chance for it to connect to some distant insight as perfectly as the moon eclipses the sun.
It’s often unexpected, but when it does happen, it’s any learner’s dream.
It’s why it only took a few minutes for me to plan this piece and link it to fires, which is as random as it gets.
It’s ironic, but even this fact I write now is ‘surface-level,’ so I’ll be a man of my word and go a little deeper.
As you add more and more notes, your collection reveals a neat little quirk: hidden questions.
It’s nothing edgy or mysterious, but the logical result of a tidy note collection.
When you add those first basic ideas, questions pop up -questions you saw coming from a mile away and can address with a single neuron.
“Progressive overload is key for muscle growth”
What’s that? Adding intensity to your exercise over time, as you get stronger, faster or fitter.
Why do it? To get bigger, faster, stronger, daft punk style.
How can you do this? Add weight to your sets each week, or add an extra set, or cut your rest period in half -that sort of jazz.
You get the picture. These are the easy questions and answers which follow.
But if you continue with the questions, you whittle away the obvious ones and reveal more exciting avenues.
Like a toddler asking “Why? Why? Why?” a million times in a row, you trace a thought beyond the who what and where to reach the why. The big questions that make your mind work.
Why do we lift weights?
Why do we feel the need to be bigger, faster and stronger?
What social elements come into play in a room full of motivated, masculine men?
Now this is getting interesting.
If your topic is niche enough, you’ll find yourself in uncharted territory with answers nobody has thought to seek yet.
But you can only get here once you have chipped away the rest. A large collection of notes will have answered many of these smaller questions and will leave room for the important ones to come.
You address the stale to plant the seeds for fresh, exciting ideas to come. The new life after the fire that consumes all.
It’s tedious at first, but who is an expert without the fundamentals?
Write with vigour, lay down the basics, build yourself a scaffold, and then climb it to find the gems of wisdom you seek.
Yours,
Odysseas
Twitter