A History of Burning Things

Humans are constantly bringing our traditions with us into new places, and new ages. This is something fundamental to the human condition, and when practices persist across cultures and history, it links us to each other in ways we'll probably never fully understand or even see.

One such practice is the burning of scraps of paper with worries, or sins, or hopes, or dreams, or really whatever it is deep inside of us that we no longer want deep inside of us, that we want to be set free to the universe. Maybe to be gone forever, maybe as a call to come to us in the future, but throughout time and cultures, where there's fire and writing, there's offering our words to the universe.

The digital age has shifted the act of putting words on paper to putting them on screens, replacing ink with pixels, wood pulp with steam power, bindings with clouds. It turned transient thoughts into permanent records, cataloged and searchable long after their relevance had passed.

Journals became blogs, which became microblogs, which we now know as social media. I've had a blog, in one form or another, since 2004. I've written many words on many topics in that time, occasionally serious, often sarcastic, but always an attempt to capture a moment in time and translate mood and emotion into something for others to share.

And I've always burned them to the ground after a few years to start fresh.

The reasons for this are varied but share a theme: cutting the chains that tie me to the past. While it's nice to have a record of what I've experienced and thought, and roadmap of my journey to here, to now, and the ways I've grown, that same history can become Lore, Legacy, something to be Served rather than something that Serves.

I do, occasionally, like to read what I've written. It is sometimes surprising to see my words with fresh eyes, to see a glow of forgotten wisdom or the shadow of discarded beliefs. Either way there comes a time when the words that were aren't applicable any longer. Maybe the message is still true, the core idea is solid although the execution was a bit rough, but the truth it carries still has weight. Other times it was just a moment in time, an essay about a self that I no longer am, a reflection that no longer represents me.

But, because blogs are so intrinsically personal, the two become inseparable. They grow into something larger than intended, something which wants constant feeding, which can only be satiated by the blood and the meat of the self - metaphorically, of course.

For me, that becomes too much. What was enjoyable becomes an obligation. The hobby became an unpaid job.

I had forged the very chains that bound me by creating a specific tone, specific categories, in-jokes and call-backs. The attempt to organize chaos so I could Make Things became Boundaries I struggled against.

So, I burn it all down.

I set the blog ablaze, return the words and ideas to the void, and move on. Start fresh.

I am once again free to create as I please, make new rules and new jokes and new references, until, eventually, I find myself in a corner with nothing but obligations and a match.