Solve Et Coagula

I learned about this phrase the other day: solve et coagula. It sounds like something you’d put in your Instagram bio or something you’ll get tattooed on your forearm because it sounds mysterious and cool.

It’s Latin for “dissolve and recombine”. The idea is that sometimes you have to break something down before you can build something better out of it.

The more I thought about it, the more I saw it in everyday life. And then I realized, I had already written about the same idea in my last blog post about transmuting negative into something positive.

Things fall apart all the time. Plans don’t work out. Relationships end. Houses burn down. People die. None of it feels meaningful while it’s happening. Most of the time it just feels inconvenient. Or unfair. Or like the universe has terrible timing. Eventually, life has this strange habit of gathering whatever is left and making something out of it. Still, you don’t wake up one morning grateful that everything fell apart. You just look back months or years later and realize the pieces never actually stayed scattered.

It also made me think of a quote: “Indeed, with hardship comes ease.” It’s a simple line, but I don’t think it’s saying hardship is immediately followed by comfort. Sometimes the ease is the person you become because of the hardship. Life can feel like it’s dragging you back to square one, but I don’t think it ever really does. The circumstances might look familiar. You might find yourself grieving again, starting over again, questioning everything again. But you’re arriving there with a different set of eyes. The person standing at what looks like the beginning has already been rearranged by everything that came before.