The real wisdom here isn't that destruction precedes rebuilding—we know that already—but rather that the falling apart isn't a regrettable prelude to the real work; it *is* the real work. Achebe understood that communities, like the one he portrayed in *Things Fall Apart*, don't simply exchange one stable form for another; the disintegration itself contains necessary information about what was brittle, what mattered, what can be recovered. When a marriage ends, we're tempted to see only loss, but the spouse who emerges with clearer self-knowledge has learned something the intact marriage never taught. The falling apart, painful as it is, does the teaching.