Fire is the oldest human technology — the first thing we took from nature and made ours — and it still carries, in the watching of it, something very old that quiets the modern mind in ways that no other light source replicates. Sitting by a fire is not nostalgia; it is the activation of a neural circuit that predates civilization and does not require explanation. Nasreddin built fires at night and thought beside them, which is what fires have been for as long as there have been things worth thinking about.
Each step builds on the last.