Crucible Moments, Hiccups, and the Price of Consciousness

Lately I’ve been thinking about how growth rarely feels like growth while it’s happening.

While listening to No Small Endeavor, Lee C. Camp shared a line that has stayed with me:

“It’s the crucible of those difficult times that become the most important moments for our growth as human beings.”

The word crucible feels right. A container that can withstand heat. A space where something is refined — not comfortably, but necessarily.

Around the same time, I revisited an essay by Maria Popova on The Marginalian, where she reflects on heartbreak through the evolutionary history of hiccups. Hiccups aren’t a malfunction; they’re a remnant of adaptation — evidence of how we became who we are.

She writes:

“As we rose from the oceans and crawled onto the land… we became creatures capable of love, which made us capable of loss — this is the price of consciousness.”

If love makes loss possible, then grief is not a sign of failure. It is evidence of attachment. 

Of investment. 

Of care.

Change is inevitable — in institutions, in leadership, in relationships, in seasons of life. What I’m slowly learning is that difficult transitions may not mean something has gone wrong. Or that I have done something wrong. They may mean something is being reshaped.

The crucible does not feel gentle. Evolution rarely does.

But both suggest the same quiet truth: growth and heartache are not opposites. They are often companions.

The longer I live, and the deeper my relationships grow, the more I realize that heartache—the crucible where growth is forged—doesn’t necessarily become easier.