So you have a house, a flat, a cottage, a home of any sort and you’ve decided it’s time to make it more beautiful, functional or modern, or to strip it down to the ultimate utilitarian minimalism, or you want to go all baroque on its bottom… Good, you’re arranging your closest surroundings to fit who you are now to make it feel like home. But you wouldn’t go into redecorating by stopping of at a gas station picking up a bucket of gasoline and burning the sucker down. You might strip until nothing but walls and floors are left, but the infrastructure needs to keep standing, unless you’ve maybe decided that you’re going to radically deconstruct the meaning of walls? But, we don’t change our core self that fast, if ever.

So why would you set your mental and emotional landscapes ablaze, they are much closer to you than physical spaces. Do you know why most of the “New year, new me” decisions fail? Because we believe that we’re gonna be radically different and want to change everything all at once- change doesn’t work that way but by small increments, by choosing a better (but maybe harder) option each time you’re faced with a choice. What you’ve learnt by now is too much to burn it all down. You can’t run away from everything, you don’t get to do that, it will find you eventually if unresolved, no matter where you are or what you’ve torched, but you can reframe it and expand it by new knowledge. This is what knowledge should be, this is what universities should do. Not burn you down, but get you into the position where everything you think you know is challenged and restructured in order to upgrade you. Education is not the destruction of you but a remodeling.

Fire is neutral by itself, it has no predetermined mission, but as all things it has the potential to be good and bad, life-giving and destructive. It can cook food or torch your home. Extremes are dangerous in anything and are also an easy way out that requires no intelligent intervention – and that is not good enough. The only things you should burn into oblivion are those that no longer serve you in any way, and then walk away and rebuild from what is left.