The Journey

Chapter 2: Dissolution and Resolution

There are times in everyone’s life when everything we knew begins to change shape. It happens suddenly, like a fissure in the ground beneath our feet, or slowly, imperceptibly, like water cutting through rock. And it is there that we come into contact with the profound tension between dissolution and resolution. Two seemingly opposing but inseparable forces that define the most authentic passages of our existence.

Dissolution is not just an abstract concept. It is the moment when a love affair ends, when we lose a job that defined us, when an illness changes the way we inhabit the body. It is the look we no longer recognise in the mirror. It is the bewilderment in the silences of those we thought would be there forever.
But from these very fragments comes the possibility of a resolution: not as a remedy, but as rebirth. A new form of meaning that is built with patience, listening, and a new vulnerability.

Nature has always told us this story. Leaves fall, decompose in the rain, become humus. And from that decomposition, invisible to the eyes, spring is born. Every loss is a sowing. Every end is also a beginning, but only if we have the courage to cross the void.

Alchemy

In our lives, this transformation is never neutral. It is emotional, embodied. Anyone who has experienced bereavement, failure, radical change, knows that sense of being emptied. But it is precisely in that emptiness that alchemical work is done: the mysterious and precious process by which what we have been is remixed with what we could be.

Alchemy, once a secret art, is today our most human path. Transforming fatigue into consciousness. Pain into direction. Instability into choice.
And to do this, we must learn to let go. The beliefs that no longer serve us. The masks. The roles. Even our names, when they become narrow to us. Dissolution then becomes an act of love towards our evolution.

Transition

Every transition is a threshold. The first phase is often confusing, painful. We feel like we are in a house we knew well, but which is now empty, or different. A friendship that breaks. An identity that cracks. A future that is unrealised.
Yet it is in this disorientation that the space of possibility opens up. A fertile void, where nothing is certain anymore, but everything can be born.

This space need not be filled immediately. There is no need to decide in haste, to rebuild everything in a hurry. It is necessary to stay. To listen. Allow what is new to make its way slowly, like a sprout that should not be plucked from the earth too soon.

Then, slowly, the resolution emerges. A new form of life that is not a copy of the previous one, but a more authentic expression, rooted in what we have really learnt. Resolution is the moment when we start walking again, but with a direction that is more our own, freer.

Balance

Maintaining the balance between dissolution and resolution requires presence. Knowing how to be in the middle. Not rushing the process, but not getting caught up in nostalgia either. There is a constant temptation to turn back, towards what we knew. Or to rush forward, towards any solution. But it is in listening that the real transformation happens.

Finding balance means giving voice to our innermost experience, recognising that personal brokenness mirrors the brokenness of the world. And that in both cases, each breakdown is also an opportunity to build something truer.

Dissolution and Resolution are not just phases.
They are an invitation to walk through life with more presence, to cross thresholds without fear, to recognise in fragility not a limitation, but an access to our deepest core. In this subtle dance between what ends and what is born, each existence seeks its own form, its own sound, its own breath.
As in the kaleidoscope, where each fragment – broken, irregular, dispersed – only finds harmony in continuous rotation.
And in the end, in the white, there is no absence, but union: the meeting of all colours, their silent coexistence.
It is there that dissolution is recomposed in the light.
It is there that resolution does not appear as answer, but as full presence. A place where finally, without resistance, we can simply be.

Graziana Grassini, Davide Zoppi and Giuseppe Luciano Aieta