The Right Temperature
Gold is never pure when you pull it out of the earth. It comes mixed with the rest of the mountain. Fire is what separates what belongs from what only clings. There is no drama in it. Just heat, rising until the metal answers.
People are not gold, but the principle holds. Most of what we carry is not essential. It is drift. Opinions never examined. Fears inherited without consent. Obligations that hardened into reflex. A cargo of small untruths we keep because the world rarely demands that we wake up.
Life stays lukewarm for years. In that temperature nothing burns away. Nothing clarifies. You remain mixed with the mountain and mistake that mixture for yourself.
Every real change I have seen began when the heat rose. Not pain. Heat. The pressure to stop pretending.
Sometimes it is the moment you can no longer lie to yourself. Sometimes it is the quiet responsibility of a child needing you. Sometimes it is love that refuses to let you walk away. Sometimes it is a situation with no exits left. Heat is anything that forces the truth into the open.
If the temperature stays high long enough, the dross begins to separate. First the habits. Then the excuses. Then the borrowed stories once mistaken for identity. They melt and drift outward. What remains is not a heroic new self. It is the part that was always there. The part that does not bargain with the fire.
People talk about suffering as if it purifies. It does not. Pain alone hardens as often as it softens. It only works when there is a metabolism behind it. Fire without a crucible is destruction. But when a person is ready and the heat is right, something clean begins to separate inside them.
The modern world keeps the temperature low. It surrounds us with distraction. It allows every illusion to survive. It offers a thousand ways to step out of the fire just as it starts to work. That is why so many move through life without ever meeting themselves.
We do not need more agony. We need more heat. More conditions where the truth cannot be postponed. More moments that demand something solid. Not suffering, but intensity. Not wounds, but clarity.
A person becomes real when the temperature finally rises enough to burn away what is not them.