PURGATIO

Forest rangers sometimes set fires on purpose. They choose a calm day, burn a strip of dry undergrowth and let the flames clear what has been piling up for years. It looks like destruction. A season later the ground is green again, and certain seeds, the ones that only open in heat, are finally growing.

Marcus Aurelius had no forests to manage, but he had an empire in plague and war, a difficult court and a body that often let him down. In his notebook he wrote a sentence people still copy onto the walls of their offices: what stands in the way becomes the way. The obstacle, he meant, is also material. Whatever blocks us gives us something to work with.

It is easy to agree with that on a good day. It is harder in the middle of a bad one, when the obstacle feels less like material and more like fire. A loss, a mistake, a long stretch of doubt. Things burn, and some of them we would have liked to keep.

Yet many people, a year or two later, can point to what that burning cleared. Habits that had been slowly choking them. A version of themselves they had outgrown. Room for something that could not have grown before.

Not everything that burns is being destroyed. Some things burn because they are becoming.

None of this makes the heat easier to bear while it lasts. It only means the smoke is not the end of the story.

Nobody would choose this kind of fire. When it comes, it can help to look past the flames to the ground underneath, and to wait for the first green.