Year of the Fire Horse [Sixty Years and Counting]
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is the annual writing that outlines the many things I learned—about life, the world, the universe, and the endlessly fascinating state of myself. Before I get to the lessons of my 60th year (and, yeah, I’m one of those cats who sees my 59th birthday as the beginning of my 60th year) indulge me for a moment as I elucidate something I had yet to consider until very recently.
I was born in February of 1966. At some point in my young adulthood, a lady I was dating told me that I was born in the Year of the Fire Horse. She told me it was from Chinese astrology (it is, mostly) but it turns out it is more significant in Japanese mythology. At the time, I thought it was cool. “I’m a Fire Horse, which is extremely rare. Look at how fucking rare I am. Let’s have sex!”
In Japan the Fire Horse is called Hinoeuma—and naming a fear gives it legs. This wasn’t vague astrology; it was a specific, repeatable calendar moment that shows up every 60 years. When a superstition has a schedule, people plan around it.
The Fire Horse, in Japanese culture, is a taboo sign. Fire Horse years are traditionally associated with intensity, independence, rebellion, and volatility. Sound familiar? In Japan, 1966 famously saw a sharp drop in birth rates because of the belief that Fire Horse children—especially girls—would be too strong-willed for polite society (which, honestly, sounds more like a warning label than a curse).
Japan’s birthrate plummeted—hundreds of thousands fewer births than surrounding years. People delayed pregnancies, rushed births into 1965, or waited for 1967.
Once something shows up in statistics, superstition mutates into “evidence.”
At that point, the fear feeds itself. 1966 scared people because it symbolized individuals who would not stay in their assigned lanes.
Fire Horses don’t break society because they’re dangerous.
They break it because they expose how fragile it already is.
2026? Yup. Year of the Fire Horse. I suppose in my pea brain I see this as less than a birthday and more of an emerging or an acknowledgement of what everyone in my life has always known.
The Fire Horse doesn’t arrive quietly.
It doesn’t knock.
It doesn’t RSVP.
It doesn’t wait for consensus, permission, or a laminated badge that says Approved Adult.
The Fire Horse kicks the door in, looks around the room full of sensible shoes and five-year plans, and says, “Oh. This is what you people settled for.”
And then it lights a match.
Here’s the part polite society hates: the Fire Horse is not broken. It’s not immature. It’s not “too much.” It’s reacting appropriately to a world that confuses compliance with character and stability with virtue. Everyone else is playing Jenga with their own souls—stacking jobs they hate, relationships they tolerate, opinions they borrowed from LinkedIn posts—and the Fire Horse is the asshole who says, “This tower is made of lies and vibes.”
Fire Horses don’t have patience for performative adulthood. They don’t dream of retirement parties or gold watches or being congratulated for staying in the same place long enough to develop Stockholm syndrome. They want motion. Heat. Friction. Meaning. And they want it now, not after three more promotions and a seminar on mindfulness led by someone who cries in their car at lunch.
Are they impulsive?
Yes.
Because the Fire Horse understands something the rest of us pretend not to: most doors don’t open unless you hit them at speed.
Are they blunt?
Of course.
Subtlety is for people who are afraid of the truth or hoping someone else will say it first.
Are they difficult?
Only to systems that survive on obedience, quiet desperation, and the unspoken agreement to not rock the boat while it slowly fills with water.
Here’s why the legends tried to scare people away from Fire Horse years—why births dropped, why whispers started, why “be careful” became the official slogan:
Fire Horses don’t accept the script. And anyone who doesn’t accept the script becomes a problem for people who benefit from it.
The Fire Horse asks the question nobody wants asked at the company meeting, the family dinner, the cocktail party:
“Is this it?”
And worse—
“Why are you okay with this?”
That’s not rebellion for rebellion’s sake. That’s clarity. That’s refusing to confuse endurance with virtue. That’s choosing the fire over the slow suffocation of beige living. And while beige is a color, it ain’t an interesting one.
Yes, Fire Horses burn bridges.
Some bridges are just traps with handrails.
The Fire Horse doesn’t want to destroy everything. It wants to feel alive in a world that keeps selling sedation as success. It wants a life with teeth marks on it. Scars. Stories. A pulse.
And if that makes polite society nervous?
Good.
Fire was never meant to make you comfortable.
It was meant to remind you that you’re not dead yet.
Whew.
Year 60 was a doozy, gang. Not only some significant epiphanies but also the actual application of discoveries made but never acted upon for decades. Let’s set the stage:
February 3, 2025. Still feeling some of the itchiness of a divorce from a sociopath I had the personal disregard to fall completely in love with only to have my faith in humanity squashed like a bee on the windshield of a truck carrying Amazon packages at 80 miles per hour, I was morbidly single and in an interesting position work-wise. Not events but ‘events adjacent.’ A house manager of an historic Chicago theater. So many of the scenes I was accustomed to in Chicago were no longer interesting—theater, storytelling, public radio, public performance in general—and, while I was healthy and my bills were paid, I was slightly off course.
Then, in June, my sister bought me a bed. On its surface, that sounds trivial. I had been sleeping on my couch—the one I bought after escaping one woman who had slowly chipped away at the very Fire Horse-ness of me and took with me into the marriage that nearly killed all semblance to that scary Japanese prophesy—and that bed became a symbolic life saver. Like the plastic wings Tom Hanks finds for his makeshift raft in Castaway, the bed was the push necessary to get over the waves hellbent on keeping me land-bound.
Then I convinced my dad to let go of his mortal existence and administered morphine drops on his tongue until he passed away in front of me. Sure, finding out your wife was selling herself to strangers for the last few years is a bitch but nothing can top holding your father’s hand as he takes his last breath.
Things got a little hairy at work. One of the glaring qualities of a Fire Horse, it turns out, is a resistance to bureaucracy and micromanagement and, baby, that was tracking hard. I found that my time was slipping out of my fingers like confetti. I was tired—bone tired in a way I had never experienced. I thought dating might be the answer. I was wrong.
The learning wasn’t coming easy but the lessons were there.
LESSON ONE:
Boundaries are more about protecting yourself from yourself than everyone else.
In general, I am a very trusting fellow. I believe that trust is given rather than earned. In the past, when I have trusted someone who broke that trust, I blamed them. The work assistant who lobbied to take my job. The friend who waged an online campaign against me. The wife who irrevocably shattered the marital contract. It was their fault, right?
In part, sure. My responsibility isn’t to cease trusting people. It is to more intentionally set boundaries for whom I give that trust to in the first place.
Here’s the hard truth: the first time someone crosses a boundary, it’s their fault. The second time, it’s yours. That’s not victim-blaming—that’s self-preservation. Boundaries without enforcement are just wishes. People lose this because we confuse boundaries with ultimatums. Ultimatums are control—“If you don’t do X, I will do Y to punish you.” Boundaries are self-definition—“If you choose X, I will choose Y for myself because that’s who I am.”
Boundaries aren’t fences, they’re soul perimeter. And every ruined relationship is a crime scene dusted with the fingerprints of someone who refused to respect them.
My sister learned this lesson long before I did and this past year I actually applied the lesson. Boundaries on how I train people to treat me, how I process work, what I can give in pursuit of romance. Hell, I’ve even put some of those little borders around my finances.
Cheese. It all boils down to my unstoppable and all-encompassing love of cheese. If I buy cheese in blocks, I’ll eat that shit faster than a prisoner gulping down his chipped beef before someone takes it away. If I place a boundary around my purchase of cheese—only buy expensive cheese in smaller amounts—I tend to savor it more and consume it less.
LESSON TWO:
Being clear and direct with your thoughts isn’t always received well but it is absolutely the best way to move through the world.
Being clear and direct with your thoughts will cost you social points. It will bruise egos. It will curdle small talk. It will get you labeled “intense,” “difficult,” or my personal favorite, “a lot.” But it is still—by a wide margin—the best way to move through the world.
Clarity is socially impolite. It shows up without announcement. It doesn’t warm up the room with throat-clearing or euphemism. It doesn’t bring a hostess gift. It just stands there and says, This is what I mean. People don’t know what to do with that. They were expecting interpretive dance. They were expecting vibes. They were expecting you to say one thing while meaning another so everyone could pretend they’re emotionally fluent when they’re actually just good at avoidance.
We live in an age of padded language. We don’t disagree; we “have concerns.” We don’t say no; we “circle back.” We don’t admit we’re angry; we say we’re “processing.” Everything is coated in bubble wrap so nobody gets nicked, and then everyone wonders why nothing ever gets built. Directness feels like a violation because it skips the ritual. It refuses to perform the little social lie where we all agree not to say what’s actually happening while secretly resenting everyone else for not saying it first.
At the place of employ, I began to encounter the thing I warned the boss about: micromanagement. For a few months, I stewed and spit, frustrated and angry at every request because it started to feel like certain marriages I’d been in where the wife couldn’t trust me to do a single fucking thing right. A nagging that bordered on pathological, a need to chip away at the very essence of me. Then, in a moment of clarity, I went in and very directly explained that this was not at all going to work for me moving forward. I laid it out as compassionately as I could but the message was clear: change this pattern or I walk. Credit where credit is due—the boss changed her approach to fit the guy she hired and things went back to a sense of normal.
Most people don’t want honesty—they want ambiguity that favors them. They want room to reinterpret later. They want plausible deniability. They want the escape hatch. Clear, direct speech slams the hatch shut. When you say exactly what you think, people lose the ability to pretend they misunderstood. That’s not uncomfortable because it’s rude; it’s uncomfortable because it’s final.
And yes, clarity gets punished. The office rewards the person who says, “Interesting idea,” not the one who says, “This won’t work.” Relationships celebrate the partner who says, “It’s fine,” not the one who says, “I’m unhappy and here’s why.” Families lionize the quiet sufferer and exile the truth-teller. Directness breaks the unspoken agreement that we will all participate in the slow-motion car crash rather than grab the wheel and yell.
Every time you choose vagueness over clarity, you buy yourself temporary comfort at compound interest. You avoid the awkward moment today and pay for it later with resentment, confusion, and a low-grade hum of dread. The bill always comes due. It shows up as meetings that go nowhere, relationships that rot quietly, and lives that feel strangely misaligned, like you’ve been wearing someone else’s shoes for twenty years.
Being clear is efficient. It wastes less time. It shortens arguments because it refuses to let them metastasize into tone-policing and mind-reading. It reveals incompatibility early, which is a gift even when it doesn’t feel like one. When you say what you think plainly, you either move forward or you stop pretending you are. Both outcomes are progress.
I started dating. In the past, my desire to be with someone romantically was predicated on my ability to placate and accommodate (a pattern that inevitably led to three divorces). Women demanded I pay for food for their kids, looked down their noses at my smoking, complained about my requests for reciprocity in splitting checks. At one point, I met someone who demanded nothing of me but my time. For two months, it was pretty good but the slow creep of more and more of my time requested became untenable. Instead of accommodating, debating, or discussing this state of affairs, I was direct and clear—not for me, not now.
Mini-lesson: Saying “I love you’ should require skin in the game or not said at all. Without commitment, “I love you” is a placation and manipulation.
Directness is not cruelty—though people will accuse you of that because it’s easier than admitting they preferred the fog. Cruelty is letting someone believe a lie because correcting it might be uncomfortable. Cruelty is smiling through your teeth while silently keeping score. Cruelty is saying nothing and then acting shocked when nothing changes.
The irony is that clarity often reads as aggression to people who rely on subtext. If someone has spent their whole life navigating by hints and half-statements, a clear sentence feels like an attack. It isn’t. It’s just a different operating system. One that values accuracy over harmony theater. One that believes respect means telling the truth, not preserving the illusion of peace.
Moving through the world with clarity doesn’t mean shouting your opinions like a street preacher. It means knowing what you think, owning it, and stating it without apology or theatrics. It means being willing to be misunderstood by people who benefit from your silence. It means accepting that not everyone will like you—and realizing that this was never a realistic goal to begin with.
Clarity pares your life down. It removes people who only thrived in confusion. It exposes structures that depended on your compliance. It leaves fewer relationships, but sturdier ones. Fewer conversations, but better outcomes. Less noise. More motion.
You don’t owe the world softness at the expense of truth. You owe it coherence. Say what you mean. Mean what you say. Let the chips fall where they may. The ground you gain by standing plainly is the only ground that doesn’t eventually collapse under you.
LESSON THREE:
Kindness is a responsibility and an active state and is not the same as being nice.
Most people confuse nice with kind the way they confuse a greeting card with an actual apology. Both come wrapped in pleasant fonts. Only one costs you something.
Nice is lubricated politeness. It’s social WD-40. Nice keeps the gears from squeaking at dinner parties and office meetings. Nice smiles while lying. Nice nods while resenting. Nice says, “No worries,” and then spends the next six months quietly keeping score like a Vegas blackjack dealer with a grudge.
Kind, on the other hand, is inconvenient.
Kind shows up late, wearing work boots, tracking mud across your clean floor, because it was busy doing something that mattered. Kind is honest even when honesty threatens the fragile glass figurine of harmony sitting on the table. Nice carefully dusts that figurine. Kind accidentally knocks it over and then stays to help you sweep up the mess.
Nice wants to be liked. Kind doesn’t care.
That’s the first real tell. Nice is a performance. Kind is a choice. Nice is what you do when you want to avoid friction. Kind is what you do when friction is unavoidable but silence would be worse. Nice says, “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.” Kind says, “I didn’t want to lie to you.”
Being nice is cheap. It’s transactional. You’re nice so the world will be nice back. You smile, you comply, you swallow the thought halfway up your throat, and you hope the universe notices and hands you a cookie. Spoiler: it rarely does. The universe is a raccoon. It takes what it wants and knocks over the trash can for fun.
Kindness doesn’t expect a return on investment. That’s why it’s rarer. Kindness operates without witnesses. Nice needs an audience. Nice wants credit. Kind would prefer you not mention it at all, because that would make it weird.
Nice people often enable bad behavior. They smooth things over. They excuse patterns. They mistake passivity for virtue. Nice watches someone drift toward the edge of the cliff and says, “I respect your journey.” Kind grabs them by the collar and says, “You’re about to ruin your life.”
Nice avoids conflict. Kind endures it.
Kindness can sound harsh. It can arrive with sharp edges. It can say no. It can disappoint you in the short term to save you in the long run. Nice is warm at first touch and freezing underneath. Kind can feel cold initially, until you realize it’s the only thing in the room with a spine.
If you’ve ever been truly helped—changed, not just soothed—it probably wasn’t by someone being nice. It was by someone willing to risk being misunderstood. Someone who valued your future more than their comfort. Someone who didn’t confuse love with politeness.
So be polite. Sure. The world needs fewer assholes. But don’t mistake that for moral accomplishment. Nice keeps the peace. Kind does the work.
And the work, as always, is louder, messier, and far less interested in applause.
LESSON FOUR:
Time is incredibly finite but the only thing we have of genuine value to give.
Time is the cruelest philanthropist alive. It gives everyone the exact same allowance and then watches with a clipboard while we spend it like drunk tourists in an airport duty-free shop. You get twenty-four hours. I get twenty-four hours. Beyoncé gets twenty-four hours. The guy yelling at a cashier because the coupon expired in 2017 also gets twenty-four hours. That’s the equality part. The cruelty comes later, when you realize there are no refunds, no rollovers, and no polite way to ask for more. It’s a hell of a system, and nobody signed the paperwork.
We talk about time as if it’s abstract—something that happens to us, like weather. “I don’t have time.” “Time got away from me.” As if it slipped out a side door while we were checking our phone. But time doesn’t leave. It gets spent. And once spent, it doesn’t come back with a receipt and a half-apology. It’s gone. Vaporized. Turned into memory, regret, or—if you’re lucky—meaning. Pretending otherwise is bullshit, and we all know it.
Time is the only thing you truly own, and therefore the only thing you can truly give. Money is a proxy. Words are cheap. Promises are Post-it notes slapped on the refrigerator of intention. But time? Time is skin in the game. Time is blood on the floor. Time is showing up when it would be easier—and more comfortable—to stay home and scroll yourself numb.
When you give someone your time, you’re giving them something you will never get back. Not a replica. Not a store credit version. The actual thing. That’s why it matters. That’s why it hurts when it’s wasted. That’s why it feels sacred when it’s honored. Treating it casually is a quiet kind of damnation, a small everyday sin we commit without even noticing.
Think about the moments that still glow in your memory like a cigarette ember in the dark. They aren’t usually about stuff. They’re about presence. Someone sitting with you when things went sideways. A conversation that ran long because neither of you wanted to be the first to admit it mattered. A night where the clock disappeared and the world shrank down to a table, a song, a laugh that bent the room a little.
Those moments weren’t expensive. They were finite. And finite things are fragile as hell.
We pretend time is abundant when we’re young. We treat it like a subscription we can cancel later. Sure, we’ll call. Sure, we’ll write. Sure, we’ll say the thing when the timing is better, cleaner, less awkward. And then one day the calendar starts sounding different. The pages don’t flip; they snap. You start doing math you didn’t used to do. You notice how many summers are behind you versus ahead of you. You stop assuming “later” is a given, and that realization can scare the shit out of you if you let it.
That’s when time stops being theoretical and becomes personal.
The lie we’re sold is that productivity equals value. That squeezing every minute until it whimpers is noble. That if you’re busy enough, you’re important. But busy is not the same thing as meaningful. Filling time is easy. Giving time—actually offering it with attention, intention, and care—is brutally hard. It requires saying no to a thousand small distractions that want a piece of you but deserve none of you.
Attention is time with its shoes off. It’s time staying awhile.
In order to provide that precious time to others, you gotta carve out some for yourself. Sitting in a dark room letting your thoughts go nuts. Driving alone in a Prius for 750 miles with Journey playing full blast with the window down as those miles rush past. An empty husk, burnt to the edges from productivity and bleeding yourself dry of time, is of no use to anyone and being of use is the goal. Alone isn’t lonely if it’s about recharging that slowly ineffectual battery.
This is why love is spelled T-I-M-E, even if Hallmark refuses to print it that way. Love is not grand gestures or cinematic speeches delivered in the rain. Love is Tuesday night. Love is listening to the same story again and not checking your phone. Love is choosing to be present when there’s nothing in it for you except the quiet dignity of showing up, even when it’s inconvenient as fuck.
And the opposite is true too. Withholding time is the cleanest form of cruelty. You can ghost someone without blocking them. You just stop giving minutes. You go vague. You go busy. You let the silence do the dirty work so you don’t have to.
Time reveals priorities with brutal honesty. You don’t find time for what matters. You make it. Everything else is a press release.
In the end—and yes, this is where the lights dim and the music gets honest—no one will measure your life by your efficiency. They will measure it by your availability. By when you stayed. By when you showed up. By when you chose them over the easier option of being elsewhere.
Time is finite. That’s the bad news. The good news is that its finiteness is what gives it weight. What makes it valuable. What makes it matter.
Spend it like it does.
LESSON FIVE:
The past is the present and six decades reveal the obvious trends in society.
The past isn’t behind us. That’s the lie we tell ourselves so we can get out of bed without screaming into a pillow like a Vietnam vet in a 1978 living room with the TV too loud and the beer too warm. The past is not some quaint black-and-white photograph with men in narrow ties and women smiling through clenched teeth. The past is right here, tapping on the glass, mouthing I told you so, while we pretend not to see it.
Six decades is not a long time. It’s a long weekend with a hangover. It’s three bad marriages and six randomly assigned employments. It’s enough time to notice patterns if you aren’t committed to pretending patterns don’t exist.
We love to act surprised by trends, as if history is a jump scare instead of a rerun. We behave like the future blindsides us, when really it just shows up wearing the same coat, slightly frayed, muttering the same complaints. Different soundtrack. Same plot.
Take power. We’ve been watching the same people grab it, polish it, weaponize it, and swear they’re doing it “for our own good” since the Johnson administration. The language shifts. The fonts get cleaner. The talking points get A/B tested. But the move is the same: consolidate, distract, divide, repeat. The faces change, but the posture doesn’t. Chest out. Chin up. Fingers crossed behind the back.
Every generation swears this time it’ll be different because we’re smarter now. We have data. We have apps. We have podcasts explaining things at 1.25 speed so we can feel efficient while learning nothing. But intelligence without memory is just arrogance with better lighting.
The past is the present because incentives don’t change. Only the packaging does. Fear still sells. Tribalism still feels good. Blame is still easier than responsibility. Outrage still travels faster than nuance, and nuance still dies quietly in the corner while everyone argues about the curtains.
Sixty years reveals that when technology advances faster than ethics, we don’t evolve—we amplify. The same impulses that used to whisper now have megaphones. The same lies that once took decades to circulate now do laps before lunch. We didn’t invent misinformation; we industrialized it. We didn’t create narcissism; we gave it mirrors and followers and a monetization strategy.
The trends aren’t subtle. They’re not hidden in footnotes or locked behind paywalls. They’re obvious. They’re neon. They’re screaming from the billboards of our collective behavior.
We value convenience over consequence. Speed over accuracy. Winning over understanding. Being right over being decent. And every decade we’re shocked—shocked!—when the bill comes due.
Look at how we treat work. Sixty years ago it was dignity. Then it was loyalty. Then it was hustle. Then it was branding. Now it’s burnout with a Slack notification. Same promise every time: give us your life and we’ll give you meaning. Same outcome every time: layoffs announced by email and a branded mug to remember the experience.
Look at how we treat each other. We’ve been atomizing ourselves since the suburbs, perfecting the art of being alone together. We replaced front porches with screens, conversations with takes, disagreement with exile. Then we wondered why loneliness feels like a public health crisis instead of a personal inconvenience.
The past is the present because human nature has not had a software update. It’s still running the same operating system: fear, desire, ego, love, insecurity. We slap new interfaces on it and call it progress, but the core code remains stubbornly the same.
Six decades tells you this: progress is real, but it’s fragile. Rights are gained and then quietly questioned. Truth is established and then relentlessly sanded down. Every inch forward comes with a receipt and a warning label we refuse to read.
The obvious trend is not decline or ascent—it’s oscillation. Two steps forward, one step back, one step sideways while arguing about who gets credit. The arc doesn’t bend toward justice by itself. It bends because people grab it with bloody hands and refuse to let go.
And the final, uncomfortable trend? We always think we are the exception. That our moment is unique. That this time the rules don’t apply. That history is something that happened to other people who didn’t know better.
They knew better. They just made the same compromises we’re making now and told themselves the same stories to sleep at night.
The past is the present because it never left. It’s waiting to see if we’re paying attention this time—or if, once again, we’ll pretend the pattern is a coincidence and act stunned when the ending looks exactly like the last six seasons.
LESSON SIX:
To be fully human is to relish both comfort and suffering, joy and sadness, moments of full contentment and deserts of complete dissatisfaction. One without the other is a life out of balance.
When Aldous Huxley published Brave New World in 1932, he imagined a totalitarian dystopia based not on cruelty and pain, but on providing the masses with so much safety, comfort, and pleasure that they contentedly exist as slaves.
Huxley’s novel begins when one Mustapha Mond, who controls Western Europe for the global government, hears of one John the Savage, a white man raised on an Indian reservation in the American Southwest. Brought back to London, the Savage, whose mind was formed on the collected works of William Shakespeare, inexplicably refuses to join the joyful collective, which is like an endless Carnival Cruise, without the mass brawls.
The Controller, Mond, summons the Savage to an audience, not to abuse him, but to find out what on earth is wrong with the man. Who wouldn’t want peace, sex, entertainment, safety, equality, and all the benefits of a perfectly managed hedonistic society?
“Our civilization has chosen machinery, medicine, and happiness,” boasts Mond, in explaining why the authorities have to keep the Bible and other books offering a contrasting worldview locked away from view. Had there been social media, it too would have been banned, for the greater good of all in this technocratic, therapeutic, totalitarian order.
The men spar over what it means to live a good life. The Savage argues that a life worthy of calling itself human is one that is bound to contain suffering. The Controller disagrees, saying, “We prefer to do things comfortably.”
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” There was a long silence.
“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.
Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. “You’re welcome,” he said.
We live in an era that treats discomfort like a system error. A glitch. Something to be debugged, muted, optimized away. We want joy without grief, success without failure, comfort without the bill that always arrives afterward. We want the highlight reel without the bruises, the wisdom without the embarrassment of having been wrong, the glow without the burn. We want to skip the desert and somehow still appreciate the oasis.
That’s not enlightenment. That’s emotional fast food.
Being human isn’t about curating a life where nothing hurts. That’s not balance—that’s anesthesia. And anesthesia has its uses, sure, but you don’t live under it. You don’t love under it. You don’t grow under it. You just float there, technically alive, spiritually on airplane mode.
The uncomfortable lesson is that suffering isn’t a design flaw. It’s a feature. A brutal one, yes, but an essential one. Suffering is the contrast agent that makes joy visible. Without it, happiness becomes noise. White noise. Elevator music playing while you wait for a life that never quite starts.
Think about the moments that actually mattered. Not the Instagram ones. The real ones. The ones that stuck. The heartbreak that rearranged your internal furniture. The failure that knocked the smug off your face. The stretch of dissatisfaction so dry and endless it forced you to confront the possibility that maybe—just maybe—you didn’t have it all figured out.
Those moments weren’t pleasant. They weren’t shareable. They didn’t come with a soundtrack. But they carved depth into you. They gave you weight. They made you interesting in the only way that counts: by making you real.
Comfort, on the other hand, gets a free pass it doesn’t deserve. We treat it like a moral achievement, when really it’s a rest stop. Necessary, yes. Sacred, even. But not the destination. Comfort is where you catch your breath, not where you build your character. Stay there too long and it starts to rot. It turns from nourishment into stagnation. From shelter into a padded cell.
And yet you do need it. You need warmth, safety, tenderness, ease. You need laughter that isn’t ironic. You need moments where nothing is demanded of you except your presence. Anyone who romanticizes suffering as the sole path to meaning is just selling a different flavor of nonsense. Asceticism is still escapism if it’s used to avoid joy.
Balance means letting both exist without trying to crown one as morally superior.
Joy isn’t fake because it’s fleeting. Sadness isn’t noble because it hurts. They’re just weather systems passing through the same sky. The problem comes when we start rooting for one and denying the other entry, as if we can curate the emotional guest list of our lives without consequences.
You can’t. The bouncer always lets them all in eventually.
A life stripped of sadness becomes shallow, brittle, incapable of empathy. A life stripped of joy becomes unbearable, self-serious, and cruel. The fully human life is the one that allows for both—the laughter that feels earned because you remember the silence, the peace that lands harder because you’ve known chaos, the contentment that doesn’t need to be eternal to be enough.
And dissatisfaction? That’s the one everyone wants to exile first. But dissatisfaction is the engine. It’s the itch that says, “This isn’t it yet.” Without it, nothing changes. No art gets made. No courage is summoned. No lies are questioned. A person without dissatisfaction is not enlightened—they’re domesticated.
The desert matters because it teaches you what water is worth.
To live a balanced life is not to chase happiness like a lottery ticket or flee pain like it’s radioactive. It’s to stand in the middle of it all and refuse to flinch. To say yes to the whole, messy, contradictory experience. To stop demanding that life justify itself to you and instead participate in it fully—calluses, scars, joy, boredom, awe, and all.
Anything less isn’t peace.
It’s avoidance dressed up as wisdom.
And avoidance has never made anyone fully human.
THE BIG LESSON:
Every breath is a choice. Every choice is a brick in the road to oblivion. Every brick is a step forward. Live your life like you’ll die in a year and everything is more defined and intentional.
I watched my dad die. After an awful night of him wrestling with demons (and likely his horrible mother), his last words in his long life were directed to me. “Thank you,” he said. It is most likely he was thanking me for adjusting his pillow but I can hope it was for something larger, can’t I? He tossed himself off the bed, grasped my hand tightly, and took his last breath.
I’ve spent a lot of that elusive time since trying to figure out what I’m supposed to learn from that moment.
I wonder if, had someone credible who my father believed came to him just before he started dialysis and showed him how his last year of life would unfold by making that choice, if he would decide differently. If he could’ve seen how helpless he’d become, the toll on his body and mind, the cage it would put my mother in, would he have chosen an alternate path?
Truly, his last year was a nightmare for a man so robust and driven a decade earlier. He used to love driving to homes he’d put up for sale all over the Midwest. Fixing things in those houses as well as his own. He loved being in charge and being right most of the time. The last years, he couldn’t hear or see the television but sat in a chair with it blaring so loud the neighbors could follow the stories of Duck Dynasty or repeated viewings of classic westerns. He slept fitfully for a lot of his day with only a meal to motivate his sense of forward momentum. He counted hundreds of pills, complained about his constant pain, and could barely walk to the porch.
From my vantage, he stopped living his life as soon as he decided to be hooked up to a mechanical vampire.
The simple truth is that we all die and, unless hit by a bus or by a stray bullet in a seedy neighborhood, it is a slower descent. The difficult truth I cannot escape is that he chose this route. Every day, out of stubbornness or fear of death, he continued to choose degradation and irrelevance, chose to be a burden on his life partner, chose to spend their entire savings on a mega-sized bag of Skittles comprised of medications promising him a moment of respite as his failing body kept shutting down.
The unavoidable question as he grasped my hand and his soul slipped out of his body was “Is this it? Why are we okay with this? Why was he okay with it?”
The first piece of the lesson is choice.
My dad chose to give up on life when he was first diagnosed. He just… stopped. In the earliest days of his decline, he chose to do nothing. I’ve long been skeptical of the mantra that disease is something you fight like a drunken bully in Roadhouse. You can’t possibly win in that fight but you can actively resist the effects. He decided to wallow in his depression, refused any sort of exercise, and sat. As if he was waiting for some spectre of Death to just stroll in, offer him a shot of whiskey, and escort him to the Promised Land. He was so complacent that after a year he was told he’d lose the use of his legs if he didn’t get up and move.
The end of his road was littered with collateral damage of his choices (as are all of our lives, right?). We choose every single day whether to exercise or not, which meals are necessary, which pants and shoes to wear. We choose to go to work or blow it all up, take a day of meaningless streaming, or scroll through several hours of Youtube or Tik Tok videos. We choose anxiety or care-free, excuses or responsibility, kindness or blatant self interest.
Would the information of the exact moment and the year leading to that day of my father’s last breath have changed his choices?
I’m reminded of a poem my grandfather introduced me to when I was very young. Edmund Vance Cook’s How Did You Die? The final stanza is applicable:
And though you be done to the death, what then?
If you battled the best you could,
If you played your part in the world of men,
Why, the Critic will call it good.
Death comes with a crawl, or comes with a pounce,
And whether he’s slow or spry,
It isn’t the fact that you’re dead that counts,
But only how did you die?
It isn’t about literal death. It’s about quitting while still breathing.
We don’t get to choose when we die or the specific method of demise. We do get to choose how we go out of this world. Every choice we make is a brick in that structure leading to an inevitable end.
Flipping the script, I have to ask myself the same question: if I knew that I’d be done with this body and the electromagnetic pulses that keep my brain alive in exactly one year from today, would I make different choices toward the how of my death?
A Fire Horse doesn’t approach the inevitability of death quietly, politely, or with a neatly folded brochure from the wellness industry. A Fire Horse approaches death the way a drag racer approaches the end of the track: foot still on the gas, engine screaming, daring the finish line to blink first.
Fire Horse energy—whether you take it mythically, symbolically, or as a useful lie we tell ourselves—doesn’t deny death. That’s an important distinction. It knows death is inevitable. It just refuses to reorganize its life around that fact in a timid way. Where other temperaments try to soften death, spiritualize it, bargain with it, or ignore it until it taps them on the shoulder, the Fire Horse stares it down and says, “Fine. But I’m not slowing down for you.”
A Fire Horse understands something most people pretend not to: death gives urgency its teeth. Without death, passion would be decorative. Ambition would be optional. Love would be theoretical. The Fire Horse doesn’t romanticize dying—but it absolutely weaponizes the knowledge of it. Time is not something to be filled. Time is something to be burned.
That’s why Fire Horses tend to live loudly. Not because they’re reckless idiots, but because they instinctively reject the quiet surrender most people mistake for maturity. They don’t want to “age gracefully.” They want to arrive at the end exhausted, scorched, possibly limping, but unmistakably used up. The Fire Horse nightmare isn’t death. It’s a long life spent deferring itself.
Death, to a Fire Horse, is not a tragedy. Wasted momentum is.
So how does a Fire Horse approach death? By refusing to rehearse for it. By refusing to live like a cautious tenant in their own life. By saying yes too often, by starting things they might not finish, by loving in ways that leave marks, by risking embarrassment instead of perfect safety. Fire Horse energy doesn’t want a legacy plaque—it wants scorch marks on the floor.
This doesn’t mean the Fire Horse is fearless. That’s a myth. Fire Horses feel fear deeply. They just resent it when fear starts making decisions. Fear can ride in the passenger seat, maybe even yell directions, but it doesn’t get the wheel. Death can exist in the background, but it doesn’t get veto power.
There’s also a strange honesty here. Fire Horses don’t pretend they’ll outthink death with positivity or out-plan it with spreadsheets. They don’t rely on the illusion that being careful earns extra time. They know death is not impressed by caution. So they choose intensity instead. Presence instead. Engagement instead.
If there’s spirituality in the Fire Horse worldview, it’s not about transcendence, it’s about combustion. The idea isn’t to escape the body or the world, but to inhabit them fully, even violently, until the clock runs out. Fire Horse wisdom says: if this is temporary, then make it unmistakably alive.
In the end, a Fire Horse doesn’t ask, “How long do I have?”
It asks, “What am I doing with the heat?”
And when death finally shows up—as it always does—the Fire Horse doesn’t greet it with surprise or negotiation. It greets it like an old rival and says, “Yeah. I figured. But look at the mess I made before you got here.”
That’s not denial.
That’s defiance with its eyes open.
This year has been the final one of accepting the need to heal from betrayal, the desire to crawl into bed and sleep away the hurt and disappointments, the thwarted expectations, the sense of apology for the who and what I am for those less inclined to want the loud, obnoxious old man at their party.
I am a Fire Horse, gang. Edmund? That’s how I will choose to die. With scorch marks on the floor.
Think what you will but I believe I’m jumping into my seventh decade with exactly the right attitude. Let’s go!
