Of Fire, Dwarfs and Logarithms

If I were to try to map out all the roads, all of those little trails where I've wandered throughout my life, that have brought me where I am today, I'd probably never finish this essay. So, I'll focus on one main road today.

In Estonia, we celebrate Father’s Day on the second Sunday of November. This year, it falls on the 9th, which also happens to be my dad’s birthday. So, I want to take a moment to talk about my father.

My father has taught me many things over the years. A lot of it is practical, like mowing the lawn with a tractor or building a straight woodpile so it doesn’t fall over during the winter. And while building those woodpiles, he taught me how to tell the type of the wood by the pattern and colour, by the bark, and sometimes by the smell. There are some that I can identify with certainty. But, I still mix up a lot of them.

And while a lot of what he taught me was practical and is still in use regularly, there are things he taught me—or I should rather say, had to teach me—that were necessary at one point, but—and I will die on this hill—are actually completely useless.

There was a time during high school when I spent an ungodly amount of time in the evenings and weekends trying to understand what are logarithms and what these little fuckers are good for. A chunk of information I haven’t used or thought about in over a decade.

Sorry, that’s actually a lie. I have thought about it, in a sense, as I am thinking about it now—that I only learned it to pass the test, and the fact that I haven’t thought about it since. To the extent that today, I have no idea what they are, how to solve an equation (if that's what it's called?), or what they are used for. But my dad spent hours on end sitting at the dining room table with me, helping me make sense of the topic at hand.

This wasn’t the first nor the last time I turned to my dad with a math issue. He has this unique skill of explaining things, simplifying and unwrapping topics in a way no teacher ever could. And the truth is that I would never have passed that logarithms test, and many others, if it weren’t for him.

But one of the earliest memories of my dad teaching me something, comes from a time when I was seven years old. It was around Christmas time and one evening I asked my dad to light a candle, to which he said that if I’m being careful, I could do it myself.

Nothing seemed scarier then. To me, the moment the match catches fire—that small flash—had always seemed just as dangerous as holding a lit firework in your hands. Not to be dramatic or anything, but I was certain that I would set myself on fire, and the fact that my dad—or anyone else in the family—had ever been in flames while lighting a candle felt like some kind of a sorcery to me. To my seven-year-old brain, lighting a candle felt nothing short of a movie stunt.

My dad chuckled a bit when he saw my reaction and asked, "Why would it burn you? You’ve seen me do it a hundred times."

Fair. I had seen him do it a hundred times. And each time he’d managed to stay unharmed.

He then proceeded to take a candle and a box of matches and sat down, legs crossed, in front of the fireplace. He looked at me, reached out his arm, and said, "Come here, I’ll show you."

I sat on his lap, and he started with the theoretical part of the lesson. It illustrates perfectly what kind of a person my father is. He has this curiosity and thirst for knowledge about him. He is not satisfied with the fact that something just works. He needs to know why it works the way it does and all the mechanics behind it. And he always taught me and my siblings those things as well: the reasons behind, the "why’s."

And now that I think about it, it's probably one of the reasons why my brain is filled with fun—and not so fun—facts about one thing or another, and why I love all kinds of trivia board games (so does he, by the way).

First, he told me about the fire triangle: that fire, in order to exist, needs three things—fuel, heat, and oxygen—and what each of them was and where they came from in our mission to light a candle with a classic wooden match.

Then he explained and demonstrated how to hold a match, the inner workings of fire and flame—how the flame always points upward, and as long as I held the match upright with the burning end higher than my fingers, it would not burn me, and I’d have plenty of time to light the candle.

Then he instructed me to position the wick of the candle a little at an angle, to make it easier for the flame to catch. And finally, once the candle was lit, how to blow out the match, which again didn’t go without a scientific explanation for why the flame dies when you blow on it.

Then it was time for the practical part. He asked me to take one match and close the box. He let me hold the matchbox and the match and put his hands over mine. With one quick snap, our match caught fire. And we didn’t set ourselves on fire—imagine that! We slowly carried the flame under the wick, and like magic, the candle was lit. I blew out the match as he had instructed earlier, and just stared at that candle, thinking, "I did that!" I felt like the bravest girl in the world.

And of course, after the holidays, I returned to school with my freshly learnt knowledge of how fire works. I was sure to tell everyone what my daddy had taught me over the Christmas holidays. I remember my teacher being stunned when a first grader explained the fire triangle to a bunch of classmates. I was certain my dad was the smartest man who had ever lived.

Of course, as I grew, the lessons changed as well. Don’t get me wrong, my dad is the first person I call when I need help with anything practical, at home or otherwise. I’m still certain that if he doesn’t have the answer then no one does. But as time went on, the lessons changed from practical to more philosophical, from how to light a candle to how to navigate life.

There are many expressions I've heard him use throughout the years, but there are a couple that I carry with me wherever I go.

For example, "Deal with a problem when there’s one to deal with." It's his way of saying to stop overthinking and creating hypothetical problems in your mind that only stress you out, before there's anything to really worry about.

But one of the things my dad has always said—an expression I've never heard anyone else use—is something that I only started to understand as I got older. I've tried to translate it as best as I can, and I know it sounds kooky, and it doesn't help that there's a word missing in English that perfectly conveys the meaning I'm looking for.

Anyway—and stay with me here—the expression is, "Don’t let strange dwarfs/elves sit on your shoulder."

We all have "dwarfs" that sit on our shoulders—our worries and responsibilities. And if someone asks you to carry theirs for a moment, if you can, and you have the resources to help them out, absolutely do that, but don’t take on other people’s responsibilities as your own. Don’t let the weight of someone else's "dwarfs" crush you because you're afraid of saying "no".

So, it basically means the same as "Don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm." And that is something that echoes in my mind whenever I'm in a situation where I'm about to say "yes" while my heart screams "no".

There is so much I could write about my dad, but the main thing I need to say is that he's the best dad I could’ve ever asked for, and I am the person I am largely because of him. Clearly, my mum has had a just as much influence on me, but I see more and more every day how much I am like my father.

Happy Birthday and happy Father’s Day, Dad!