Who Are You Lighting Fires For?

There's a house in the township where people go at night.

Not every house, one particular one, and everybody knows which.

It might be that the fire's good there, or the women of the house is welcoming, or there's a bit more room.

Whatever the reason, that's the house.

And after the work is done, people drift toward it without arranging anything.

They come in and they sit down.

It starts with the ordinary business, who's ill and who's away and what the weather's doing to the peats.

And then somebody starts a story or a song and the evening turns into what it was always going to turn into.

And over in the corner, out of the road, there are children.

Nobody has sat them down.

Nobody's teaching.

They're just there, near the fire, half asleep some of them, listening to the same tales for the 40th time.

And that is how the entire culture of Gaelic Scotland get handed from one generation to the next.

Not in a school, not by anybody deciding to pass anything on.

In a room with a fire in it, where the adults were doing what they'd have been doing anyway, and the children were allowed to be present.

They called it the Taikele, the visiting house.

And I want to spend this episode on it because there's something in how it worked that I think most of us have gotten badly wrong about helping people.

MUSIC Hello and welcome to the Sage in the Sky podcast and the Light Over the Hill series.

If you're new, every week I take a bit of the old folklore of this country, put some psychology beside it, pull a card and hand you one thing to do with it.

And we're near the end now, 11 of 12.

Back at the start of August at Lunastyle, we spent an episode asking who lit the fire on your hill.

All the people who did something small and went home and have no idea you're still warming your hands at it.

This is the other side of that.

Who are you lighting them for? And I need to be careful here because there's a version of this episode that would do you actual harm and I want to be careful that I don't say it.

The version where I tell a woman who is already running herself into the ground for other people that her calling is to be a light for others.

Go and pour out a bit more.

Somebody needs you.

You do not need that.

You have been doing that since you were about 19 and it is a large part of why you are tired.

So let me say what I actually think and it's less comfortable than the greetings card version.

Most of what we call helping is doing things for people that they could do themselves and it does not light any fires.

It makes them smaller and it makes you emptier and the two happen together and they're the same process.

There's a piece of family therapy I'll come to later that puts numbers and a name on that and when I first understood it properly I had to go and have a think about several of my own relationships because the awkward part is that it's reciprocal.

The more you take on, the less the other person carries.

Not because they're lazy, because that's how the system settles.

Two people find a balance, and if one of them is doing 80%, the other one is doing 20.

And the 80 is causing the 20 as much as the other way round.

Which means the most generous woman in the room may be the one quietly keeping everybody small.

That's a hard sentence and I'd not say it if I didn't think the alternative was better.

Because there is another way of doing it and our ancestors had it and it was going on in that house with the fire and the children in the corner.

Nobody in that room was carrying anybody.

The adults were doing their own thing well in front of witnesses.

and the culture went across anyway, more thoroughly than any school has managed since.

So, that's this episode.

The visiting house, then the psychology of over-helping, and then a card that is the warmest woman in the deck, and who is, I'd point out, sitting down.