You'll have heard about Lyons by now. If not the details, then the shape of it: a city that was there at nightfall and gone by dawn. Not damaged — gone. One of the most prosperous places in the province, erased in the time it takes to sleep.
A friend of mine who loved that city is devastated. I don't say that lightly or dismissively — his grief is real, and I'm not going to talk him out of it with philosophy. But watching him, I notice something: what's undone him isn't just the loss. It's the surprise. He had steeled himself, he thought, against misfortune. He had done the work, prepared his mind, practiced equanimity. And then something happened that he had never thought to prepare for, because it had never happened before. That gap — between the evils we rehearse and the evils that actually arrive — is where the weight lands hardest.
It is the unexpected that puts the heaviest load upon us. Strangeness adds to the weight of calamities.
So here is the thing I keep coming back to, and I want you to hear it not as a lecture but as something I'm working through myself: we have to prepare for more than we think is likely. Not obsessively, not in a way that poisons the present with imagined disasters — but honestly. The mind sent forward in advance, as I think of it. Not asking what usually happens but what can happen. These are very different questions, and most of us only ever ask the first one.
Lyons had stood for a hundred years. In a century it had survived wars and floods and the ordinary grinding of fortune. And then one night, faster than it takes to tell the story, it was over. This is not an argument for despair. It's an argument for accuracy. We tend to assume, without examining the assumption, that what exists will keep existing — that the structures we depend on are permanent features of the world rather than temporary arrangements that fortune tolerates for a while before dismantling.
Cities fall. Mountains dissolve, slowly, but they dissolve. Coastlines that were once inland are now underwater. The works of nature herself do not last — why should the works of human hands? This isn't pessimism; it's the plain view from any distance. From close up, everything looks stable. Pull back far enough and you see that stability is just slow change, and slow change is just destruction that hasn't finished yet.
I find this, strangely, more comforting than the alternative. If everything is subject to this — empires and cities and individual lives all under the same jurisdiction — then the loss of any particular thing, however beloved, is not a cosmic injustice. It's the terms we agreed to by arriving here. The law is the same for the highest and the lowest. The road is lined with monuments of unequal size, but the ashes beneath them are all the same.
What I want for you — and what I want for myself, on the days when I manage it — is a mind that has genuinely absorbed this. Not performed the absorption. Not nodded along to the idea and then been shattered when it arrives in practice. Actually taken it in, the way the body takes in food, so that it becomes part of how you move through things.
Death is not an evil. Ruin is not an evil. Loss is not an evil. These are the words that reputation has given them, passed down through generations of people who feared them without ever examining whether the fear was warranted. What would it mean to actually test the assumption? To look at what we fear and ask: is this bad, or have I simply been told it is bad?
We are in the power of nothing when once we have death in our own power.
Start there. Work outward. The city that falls in a night was always going to fall. The only question was whether the people who loved it had made any peace with that before the morning came.
With love, and no illusions,