COMBUSTIO

There is a moment in every fire when it stops being a flame and becomes a process. The logs are no longer burning only on the outside; the heat has reached the core, and there is no going back. You could pour water on it now, but you would be left with something charred, half-changed and useless.

Heraclitus saw the world as a chain of such exchanges. Fire lives the death of air, he said, and air the death of fire. Nothing appears without something else giving way. Every change is also an ending.

We tend to be good at beginnings. A new job, a new training plan, a new way of living. The hard part comes later, in the middle, when the old form is already gone and the new one is not there yet. That is where most changes get interrupted. It hurts, it takes longer than expected, and it is tempting to put the fire out and go back.

People who have been through a real change, a move to another country, a long recovery, the end of a long relationship, often say the same thing. The worst part was the middle. The most important thing was not to stop there.

Do not put out the fire before it has finished its work.

That is easier to say than to live. Sometimes we need help to stay in the heat: a friend, a routine, a reason. Sometimes all we can do is wait one more day.

Fires do finish, and when they do, they leave something behind that could not have existed otherwise. What it is, we only see once the smoke clears.