ARSIS

Anyone who has climbed a mountain knows the strange moment near the top. Your legs are heavy, your pack is heavy, and yet you feel lighter than you did at the bottom. Somewhere on the way you stopped carrying things that did not matter: last week's argument, the plans for Monday, the need to look good in the photo.

Fire does something similar. It rises because it is hot and light. What cannot rise stays behind as ash.

Heraclitus liked to point out that opposites belong together. The way up and the way down, he said, are one and the same. The path you climb in the morning is the path you walk down in the evening. Nothing about the road changes. You do.

We usually picture progress as effort: more work, more pressure, pushing harder uphill. Sometimes that is true. But many people who have come through a difficult period describe it differently. They rose because something fell away. A fear, an old role, a relationship that had been holding them in place.

You rise by burning away what kept you down.

This kind of rising is rarely fast, and it seldom feels heroic while it is happening. It feels more like loss. Only later, looking back from a little higher up, does its shape become clear.

Fire does not decide to climb. It simply burns, and climbing is what burning does. There may be something in that for the rest of us: less forcing, and more letting the heat do its work.