It doesn’t take a fire to know that something inside you is burning.
Sometimes a candle is enough.
A small, upright, stubborn flame, standing there in the middle of the world’s chaos with a dignity that we human beings, frankly, can only dream of. Bottles, glass, reflections, noise, half-lived lives, nights that ended badly and others that began even worse all around it. Yet it remains. Lit. Simple. Almost ridiculous in its fragility. And still alive.
Maybe that’s what strikes me.
The fact that, deep down, each of us carries that same thing. A kind of inner fire. A current. A blind stubbornness. A calling we don’t always understand, don’t always follow, and very often mistake for idiotic desires, plastic ambitions, needs borrowed from other people.
Because this is the truth: almost no one really knows what they’re doing here.
We get up, work, chase money, approval, love, temporary truces, badly managed orgasms, vacations that are too short, and promises that crumble at the first bad Monday. All the while we tell ourselves that sooner or later we’ll understand everything. Sooner or later the sign will come. The vision. The insight. That perfect moment when the universe takes us aside and says: relax, buddy, here’s your mission—just sign at the bottom.
Except it usually doesn’t happen that way.
Usually we stand here like clueless assholes, trying to figure out where we belong, while life does what it does best: rush us when we’re confused and confuse us even more when what we need is direction.
And still that flame remains.
Even when we pretend it isn’t there.
Even when we lose our way.
Even when we live on autopilot, our souls on standby and our brains crammed with advertising, anxiety, and pointless chatter.
To me, that is exactly what the first image is about. A fire that doesn’t need to shout in order to exist. It stays there, small but present, the way real things do. Because what is authentic doesn’t need desperate stagecraft. It doesn’t need to convince anyone. It simply burns.
The problem is, we’re brilliant at ignoring it.
We know how to hear the noise, but not the call.
We know how to chase what glitters, but not what gives light.
And so we spend years wasting energy trying to become something we are not, while a small flame inside us keeps saying: you do realize you didn’t come here for this clown show, right?
Then there is the second image.
Those candles arranged along the steps, one after another, as if someone had left a path there. A trail. A kind of silent invitation to descend deeper. And maybe that is precisely the point: the search for oneself is not a triumphant climb. It is not always a victory march upward, not a speech from a stage with epic music playing underneath.
Far more often, it is a descent.
Inward.
Down stairways when you have no idea where they lead.
Through dark corners of yourself you had managed to avoid, quite respectably, for years.
Because the inner journey, if you take it seriously, is not an elegant affair. It isn’t that polished concept from a spiritual magazine cover, with smiling people dressed in linen and aphorisms printed over a sunset.
No.
The inner journey is uncomfortable. Brutal at times.
It forces you to look at what you did, what you failed to do, who you were, who you sold yourself as, how many times you betrayed yourself out of fear, convenience, or simple exhaustion. It makes you sit across from your emptiness without changing the subject. And for many people, that alone is a kind of hell.
But maybe it is the only way.
Because your life’s purpose—assuming it truly exists in some precise form and isn’t instead a path revealed one step at a time—won’t be found on the surface. You won’t find it in the persona you show the world. You won’t find it in poses, roles, labels, or well-packaged job titles. You find it farther down. In the place where no one applauds and no one sees a thing.
Where there is only you.
And the questions that truly matter.
What sets you alight?
What makes you feel alive without needing an explanation?
What would you do anyway, even if no one promised you success, money, or recognition?
Where do you feel pain, where do you feel truth, where do you feel beauty?
And one more: what are you willing to lose in order not to lose yourself?
They are uncomfortable questions. Pain-in-the-ass questions. The kind you can’t dismiss with a clever line or a motivational post written by someone who probably hates their own life more than you hate yours.
But they remain.
Like those lights along the steps.
One after another.
They don’t show you the whole path.
They show you only the next step.
And that is already a great deal.
Maybe this is the most honest part of the whole conversation: no one really sees the entire map. We move forward in fragments. By intuition. By mistakes. By sudden returns. Through days when you feel inches away from something important, and others when you seem to be nothing more than a confused mammal paying bills and searching for meaning somewhere between a failure and a beer.
And yet, in the middle of it all, something moves.
We make a mess of things, yes.
We live through beautiful moments and immediately afterward do something stupid enough to ruin our emotional digestion for two weeks. Sometimes we do someone some good. Other times we can’t even do right by ourselves. We love badly, react worse, lose ourselves in the wrong people, the wrong timing, crooked desires. But meanwhile, we learn. Or at least we try.
Maybe purpose doesn’t arrive as a perfect formula.
Maybe this is how it is built.
By living.
By getting it wrong.
By getting back up.
By accepting that we are unfinished.
Above all, by accepting that the fire within doesn’t always light up a highway. Sometimes it barely illuminates one corner of a stairway, a single step, and you have to find the courage to put your foot there without knowing any of the rest.
Deep down, I believe this is the real work of a lifetime.
Not becoming perfect.
Not becoming invincible.
Not becoming whatever the world finds easiest to sell.
But drawing, little by little, closer to what you truly are. Protecting that flame. Refusing to let it go out beneath the weight of expectation, fear, and the organized mediocrity sold to us as normal life.
Because the world, let’s be honest, was not exactly designed to help you find your soul. It was designed to make you productive, tired, distracted, and preferably obedient. A kind of domesticated animal with an active subscription. Finding your center in a place like this is almost a private act of disobedience.
So bring on the candles.
Bring on these small, fragile, imperfect symbols that keep saying something enormous. They remind us that light doesn’t have to be vast to do its job. It only has to stay alive.
Maybe that is where meaning lies.
In tending the fire.
In continuing downward, when you need to.
In refusing to stop searching, even when you don’t understand a damn thing.
In living as well as you can—which will never be a neat formula, but a mixture of intuition, wounds, mistakes, acts of kindness, ill-advised nights, and the occasional rare moment of absolute truth.
In short, maybe we really are all here trying to figure out what the hell we’re supposed to do with this life.
But meanwhile, the flame burns.
And maybe that is already a beginning.
