Where to Run Next
On direction, desire, and the false urgency of the old world in the Year of the Fire Horse
It was the Year of the Fire Horse, and the world was collapsing on schedule.
I knew this because I had a fever, and because I had turned off my phone, and because the silence that followed was so complete I could hear myself think for the first time in longer than I care to admit.
For an unintended three days, I took a complete social media fast as the collapse of the old world fell apart.
How can you just ignore it? People might call this callous, and I understood why, but I had a question I kept returning to, quiet and a little ruthless: what exactly, and why exactly, do I need to participate? In the suffering, the outrage, the downfall of many; what would my presence there cost me, and what would it buy anyone else?
I chose not to answer and turned the phone face down.
The fever had its own ideas. It stripped everything back to the bare floor of me: no productivity, no performance, no little Miss Perfect, transhuman purveyor of excellence, running her laps faster and faster with precision and intent. Just a body in a bed, hot and still, with nowhere to be and nothing to prove.
And in that uncomfortable space of nothingness, something.
There is a process that is already underway, a transformation that was initiated by a version of you who put this idea in your head and this dream in your heart, and from where they are leading you, it’s already done.
The version of you who brings this into reality is not who you are now, but if you stop interrupting, tampering with,and questioning the process, the version of you who knows how to do it will get it done.
All it asks is that you stop allowing the dominant frequency of who you have been and all you once were to cloud your ability to be here now.
I had not known, until the fever took everything else, that she had been there all along. Waiting. Patient. Certain. Calling forward from somewhere I could not yet see, already standing in the place she was leading me, assured that from where she was, it was already done.
The fever, it turned out, was not an interruption. It was the beginning.
The first thing that came up was guilt.
My entire identity had been built upon the stilts of doing.
What must I do to earn affection?
Who must I pretend to be to receive love?
What must I win to get praise, attention, belonging?
And who was I when I wasn’t performing for the things I thought I needed?
Dance, monkey, dance.
The guilt arrived in specific shapes. Not responding fast enough. Oversharing, overexplaining, going too personal with people as a kind of pre-emptive defense; if I made myself fully known, I could not be misunderstood, could not accidentally cause offense, could not be abandoned or rejected.
I was angry underneath it all, always needing to prove worth, scarcity and lack everywhere, either making myself agreeable and letting myself down or fighting disproportionately to whatever the issue actually was. My not-enough wounds screamed loud.
Just above average, but never quite enough. Not enough anywhere to fully belong.
I tried to will myself up. To be productive. To do as a good girl does: get over it, go onward in spite, pull yourself together. Just stay in motion. Don’t stop. If you slow down too much, the truth of how you feel will catch up and consume you.
Even physics warns us: it is easier to stay in motion than to overcome inertia.
Yet here I was. A body in a bed, inert, immobile, unable to serve anyone but herself.
And there was the lesson, dropping onto my chest like a very heavy bag of gold: the longer I pushed through and heroically overcame and denied all I struggled with, the less effective, the less impactful, the more out of alignment I became.
Which meant that in time, I would cause more harm than I offered good, no matter how sincere my intentions.
How much of the hurt in the world, I wondered, comes simply from people too overextended from their own care, lashing out in the unconscious exhaustion of never having allowed themselves to rest, to be loved for the nothingness of their doing?
But this was not the time to mind others. I needed to get back to me.
The dominant frequency of who I had been: the performer, the prover, the good girl in perpetual motion, was clouding my ability to be here now. I needed to learn to surrender without seeing, to release control and trust the process long enough to let the version of me who actually knew how to do this get it done.
All it asked was that I stop messing with the masterpiece I was trying to become. So I did.
I slipped in and out of lucid dreams, feverish meditations and incoherent scribbles. I baked banana bread. I cuddled the dogs and tended to them well. I gave myself a lymphatic massage and took long showers and drank so much tea. I asked for things when I needed them and didn’t feel guilty, just loved, which was itself a kind of revolution.
And in the stripping away, something unexpected: desire. Not ambition. Not obligation. Desire.
I wanted to dance.
My body wanted to run. It craved the cool envelope of pure water, the holding of the ocean; my shoulders physically asked to be opened and held in strong waves, to inhale and expand my whole essence in the presence of a mighty tree, to roll in grass and feel the thick moss and the wind and the sun. I went outside. I dreamed of nature as though it were my native tongue, even though I had spent years pretending otherwise.
I wanted to create.
My mind wanted to share creations that brought unbridled joy. To give people hope, perspective, comfort, a testimony to the miracle of being alive and the important part we each have here to play. I wanted to ask questions and follow the curious, adventurous spirit of my heart. To care for plants and animals. To feel love, be love, show love, teach love.
I wanted to play.
Not the performance of wellness. Not the curated expression of a self I had designed for legibility. Something older and more real: the reclamation of a primal energy I had not lost but buried: passion, curiosity, creativity, arriving not as the rebellious opposite of the wounded child, but as the silent presence of the whole one.
I did not yet know what to do with any of this.
But for the first time in longer than I could name, I was asking the right question.
Somewhere in the second day, or maybe the third - fever has a way of dissolving the borders between them - something shifted.
I lifted my head from the floor on which I lay to a new but familiar sound: rain.
Back West, our winters are punctuated by the powerful sounds of rain so absent in the dryness of Ontario. The wilderness of my intuition, which had been calling through all the noise, was suddenly the only sound in the room.
I began asking a different question.
Not what must I do, but is this in service of the light I know myself to carry?
It sounds simple. It is not simple. It requires you to actually know what that light is, which requires you to stop performing long enough to feel it.
Despite all the chaotic energy that had been urging me to MOVE NOW, this was not a time to rush. It was a time to discern, decide, and direct the energy of my own going.
I had spent a long time looking for acceptance in the wrong places.
Belonging where it was not being offered, knocking on doors that were never going to open, not understanding that the refusal was its own grace.
Thank goodness, I thought. Thank goodness I didn’t find it where I thought I wanted it. It would have redirected my life entirely… and not toward myself.
Here is what I understood about the old world and its offerings: unhealed pain looks for a surface strong enough to hold it. If it lands on you, it is not because you are weak. It is because you are steady.
But compassion does not mean access.
Understanding does not mean tolerance.
You can see someone unraveling and still refuse to participate. You do not argue. You do not defend. You do not harden. You simply stand until what is not yours falls away.
I had been carrying things that were never mine. I set them down in that bed, in that fever, in that silence, washed by the rain and gone with the wind. To set fire to the burden of the bridle, and trust that in order to become all we are, we must let go of all we have been.
What remained was simpler than I expected.
Some people are here to lead many lives. Others are here to lead different versions of the same one. I began to suspect I was the latter; that what looked like reinvention was actually excavation. That I was not becoming someone new but returning, with more precision, to someone I had always been underneath the performance.
A bouquet is beautiful because of what the flowers make together. No single bloom makes the same impression alone. I had spent years trying to be the whole bouquet by myself, which meant I was never fully any one flower.
The world needs everyone: every variety of skill, every frequency of being. Not one more valuable than another. Just different. And all of it is necessary to make a whole.
But before any of that, before mission, before impact, before showing up to offer anything to anyone, there was this. Just me, and me. Learning, for the first time in a long time, to genuinely like what I found there.
Nothing outside had changed, yet my entire experience was different because I had.
This is what healing looks like in real time. Not a dramatic overcoming. Not the heroic push-through. Just a woman with a fever in the Year of the Fire Horse, forced to be still enough to hear herself think, and deciding, finally, that what she heard was worth listening to.
This is it.
I got up on the fourth day.
Not because I had solved anything. Not because the world outside had steadied, it certainly had not. And not because I had a plan, a strategy, or even an optimized route forward.
I got up because I was ready to move at my own will and desire, which is a different thing entirely from moving because I thought there was something to outrun.
I was ready to push up against the growth edge of what I thought I was capable of and cross the threshold to step into who I really came here to be.
This is what the fever gave me: the authority of my own authorship.
Not borrowed from anyone’s approval, not validated through the lens of another’s regard, not contingent on being seen correctly or understood fully or accepted warmly. Mine. Simply, quietly, irreversibly mine.
The divine fire burns most efficiently in those who temper its fury with good sense.
I understood something about compassion I had not understood before:
That true compassion requires solidity.
That you cannot be genuinely moved by another’s suffering if you are drowning in your own unacknowledged pain.
That you cannot offer steady ground if you have not first found it beneath your own feet.
And my softening toward others began, paradoxically, the moment I stopped needing anything from them.
The old world will keep offering.
Begging us to stay, suddenly enticing us with ample ripe opportunities to tempt us back into the embers of old ways.
Desires of the flesh.
The apple offered.
But I had learned, in those three days of fever, in the stretching of the restless and uncomfortable second, in the holding of the empty centre after the final exhale without rushing to fill it, that this was a false urgency.
That the fire of my life force deepened in meaning, truth, and power precisely in the waiting.
This was no longer about who runs fastest. It was about running swiftly in the direction of one’s own decision, somewhere decided and desired with a deep personal why.
What it asked of me was simple and not simple at all: To belong to myself first. To like what I found there. To move from that place, and no other, not for speed’s sake, but for precision’s.
And then something else that I had not expected: once I stopped running laps in the same circle, once I set fire to the burden of the bridle and let the old frequency fall away, I did not become smaller or less. I became more.
The sovereignty I found in that stillness did not close me off from life. In their unbridled ecstasy, those who find the fire of their hearts ablaze with sovereignty discover they are simultaneously more connected to all of life. Not despite being fully themselves, but because of it.
Inhale. Open your eyes. Exhale. Hold.
How long can you hold the empty centre before you rush to fill it? That space, the one that lives after the final exhale, before the next beginning, that is where the fire deepens. That is where you find out who you actually are when no one is asking anything of you.
A wait, well worth while.
It may not feel like it, but you are, and I am, exactly where we need to be. This is not the time of where or what, it is the time of who. And that who, right now, deserves our full attention.
HERE I AM. THERE YOU ARE.
- Holding the empty centre with you, SJT
For those brave enough to sit inside the wilderness of their soul and not be afraid. 🐆