Lately I have really come to know and understand the importance of brute force. Fire class is indoctrinating me into a wonderful world in which one sometimes has to beat things down, break shit up, kick ass, take names. It's transforming my whole vision of how the world is put together.

As a skinny, withdrawn, almost cartoonishly Oliver Twist kind of child, I tended to get by on my wits rather than my strength. In grade school, only the presence of a couple of fellow geeky kids who rivaled me in puny anathleticism prevented me from being the last chosen for team events. In defensive response to my perceived weakness, I looked down on the life of the body, spurned the pointless exertions of athletes, and generally retreated into fierce pubescent snobbery.

When I first worked on the ambulance in Ohio, that began to change. Being an EMT turned out to be about more than knowing which treatments to apply to a defined set of injuries. Suddenly I found myself in a half-filled drainage ditch reeking of gasoline, cops' flashlights shining over my shoulders as I tried to keep a motorcyclist's fractured legs from bending in all the wrong places while we lifted him back up to the roadway. It was far from the life of the mind. When the man screamed I felt as if I was irretrievable damaged, a perfect lens scratched beyond usefulness. Sometime later that night I realized I felt more complete than ever before.

Being in the presence of sick, injured, and often frightened people creates a constant, almost musical theme playing in the background of my life: frailty, precariousness, the tenuous business of living. It teaches you again and again, with merciless insistence, that you are breakable.

In fire class, the the first priority is survival. There's no need for delicate inference or a background melody to remind me that fire kills people and makes life unbelievably painful for many more. Threatened with destruction, the body does whatever it can to survive. The class is like a practice session for disaster, a controlled opportunity to find out what the body is capable of doing to keep itself intact. Finding this force in myself has been as astonishing and unexpected as if I'd received alien transmissions through my coffeemaker.

For example, as I pass through doors now, I often mentally estimate the amount of effort it would take me to break the lock, pry the jamb, or otherwise forcibly enter. In buildings, train cars, and buses I casually note the place I'll be busting out of if things suddenly get very bad. It's amazing: more situations than I had realized are best solved not with finesse but with an aggressive application of unrestrained power. Sometimes the doors of the world must be forced to let us in or out.

One day in class we were being taught how to tie off various tools, fans, and ladders to be hoisted up a building. One after another, we twined the rope around the stationary Halligan bars, axes, and pike poles that had been placed out on the pavement for us. In some places it was hard to fit the rope where it needed to go, and it took us a long time to tie everything off. Irritated with our slow pace, the instructor finally yelled "These are tools! Pick them up! Move them wherever you need them to be!" I realized I'd been treating the tools as stable objects because they were unfamiliar to me. I had been hesitant to handle them and move them according to my will.

So much around us seems that way -- stable, stationary, intimidating with its apparent solidity. We don't realize how much we can do if we would just apply our own force to it. Put our hands on it and pick it up, break it, shape it into something else, whatever. You're fragile -- I've seen it -- but so is most of the stuff around you. Stop trying to outwit the world and just pick things up. Sometimes when you figure out how easy it is to break fragile things, you start thinking about how to take care of them a little better. Or maybe you start making them into what you really want.