Hopeful Thinking: Fighting fire with water

Where the heck did we get the idea of fighting fire with fire? For how often it gets used, it sure doesn’t seem like good advice.

It actually comes from two places. The first is an indigenous firefighting practice where a larger fire is starved of fuel by setting a smaller, controlled fire ahead of it and burning up the fuel in its path. Firefighters still use it today.

The second, however, comes from William Shakespeare. He wrote in his 1595 play King John, “Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire; Threaten the threatener and outface the brow of bragging horror.” The advice being that we should match the energy of an opponent in equal measure. We still do that today too. It’s the advice of bravado and pride. But only ever results in a fire storm.

Spiritual practices encourage us to be more like water in the face of fire. Water has unique qualities among the elements. It quenches and nourishes. It fits into places where earth cannot go and air is rarely welcomed. Water brings life, purification, and lasting change.

What might that mean for our conflicts with others? Especially in an age where it’s so easy to get into an argument? How can we be more like water right now? Especially when faced with destructive forces like fire? Fire would seek to boil away water into a vapor if given the chance.

Being more like water starts with intent. An intent to be more deliberate with one’s emotions. An intent to serve as a life-giving, healing balm to things that oppose our existence. Water does not seek to control or destroy the light. Only to keep it in its useful place.

Take stock of your emotional reactions to things. Pay especially close attention when you feel offended. Those are the moments of greatest potential clarity. Those are the windows into your emotional state.

Because how we respond to offense can be measured or not. It can be emotionally charged or well-reasoned and considered. It can be shooting first and asking questions later, or it can be immune to the insult, while finely tuned to the truth beneath it. It sees the wound behind the lashing out of the wounded animal and feels compassion for it.

Water slips beneath the floorboards of a bar brawl, or in between the grains of earth beneath a joust. It sees the battle from a different angle and thoughtfully considers an alternative reality where nothing is destroyed yet everything is transformed.

The Christian practice of loving our enemy is exactly such a tactic. It is water in the face of flame. It disrupts cycles of violence and recognizes the underlying hurt that tends to perpetuate it. It disarms an opponent because fire only seeks to win by enraging us. It is its only maneuver. There is nothing else in its toolbox. It is dumbfounded in the presence of peace.

Seek to have a relationship with the concept of water; with the very principle of it. Think about water. Observe how it behaves. We take water for granted because it is all around us, and we are made mostly of it. We swim in it, we drink it, we use it both to heat and to cool. We use it to purify our souls and to cleanse our bodies.

But how often do we contemplate the nature of it? What might happen if you were to spend five minutes a day closing your eyes and simply thinking about the element of water? Modern technology gives us ample methods for doing this. There are countless meditation apps for which you can set a timer for five minutes and meditate to the sounds of water. That is wholly sufficient to allow it to do its work within you.

The suggestion here is to give your brain the space to rewire itself around that notion. And as water will do, the notion will trickle into your daily actions and responses. It will become part of your nature. It will put you at ease when fire is all around you because you understand the power you have to transmute it.

It will make you respond differently to that person at work who annoys you, which will in turn change their energy as well. I have personally observed this many times. I know this tactic is factually beneficial. I know that changing our responses to insult, offense, attacks, and ideological differences has a transformative effect on both parties. It erodes even the largest of mountains over time. It is both effective as well as efficient.

You do not have to understand all the physics of water in order to integrate its elemental nature into your approaches to life. Merely spend some time thinking about it. Have a drink of water and feel it enter you. Dip your toe. Place your hands up on the surface of the water and say thank you. Connect yourself to it. Wear a vial of it around your neck as a symbol of your desire to respond to the world differently, more peacefully, more powerfully. Both for your sake, as well as all others. The wisdom of all humanity resides within it.

Wil Darcangelo, M.Div, is an ordained Unitarian Universalist Minister of the First Church of Lancaster at the Bulfinch Meetinghouse in Massachusetts, progressive theologian and essayist on optimistic spirituality in the Information Age. Follow him on Substack, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.