FLAMMA

Watch a campfire long enough and you begin to notice how alive it looks. It reaches, flickers, pulls back, leaps again. It eats and breathes. People have sat around fires for hundreds of thousands of years, and most of what we call warmth, in every sense of the word, started there.

Empedocles, the Sicilian philosopher who first described the world as made of four elements, added two forces that move them. He called them Love and Strife. Love brings things together; Strife pulls them apart. Everything that exists, he thought, is a moment in their long exchange.

Passion lives somewhere near the middle of that exchange. It is the heat that draws two people together, or draws a person to their work, a craft, a cause. It is also the heat that can burn through everything around it if nobody tends it.

We often speak of passion as something we have. People who have felt it strongly tend to describe it the other way round. Something takes hold of them. They stop resisting, and for a while they become the fire.

Passion is what you become when you stop resisting.

That can be the best part of a life: the years of building something, falling in love, making music until three in the morning. It asks for care as well. A fire that is fed every day keeps a house warm. One left to itself either goes out or takes the house with it.

Empedocles believed Love and Strife would never finish their work. The fire keeps changing. The task is to keep sitting close to it.