Where’s the Fire?
The fire went out years ago. Nobody told your nervous system.
At a conference once, walking at my usual rushed pace toward an event with a group of people I’d just met, a man stopped in his tracks and looked at me.
“Where’s the fire?”
I wasn’t running. I was just walking the way I walked everywhere, fast, deliberate, like something somewhere was burning and only I could get to it in time.
That’s the way I operated every day for years. Four kids, a full-time job, a hundred plates spinning, and one belief running underneath all of it that I never once said out loud: I have to do it all, right now, or it falls apart.
That belief wasn’t wrong, not back then. Four kids and a job and no one else to catch what I dropped, that pace was the correct response to a real load. Moving like there was a fire made sense, because some days there genuinely was one.
The memo didn’t arrive gently. It arrived as a crash at forty-two, the kind that takes you all the way down. It took me two years to climb back out of it, and the only way out was to actually change how I operated, not slow down for a while and go right back to the same pace.
That’s most of us. Moving at a pace built for an emergency that ended years ago, because the body never got the update. The urgency doesn’t check whether there’s still a fire. It just keeps running the same program it learned to run back when there was one.
So here’s the question that man handed me without knowing what he was doing. I still ask it. Where’s the fire?
Next time you catch yourself moving like something’s burning, stop for one second and ask it yourself. Where’s the fire. Not next week if the laundry sits one more day, or tonight if you don’t text back the second your phone buzzes. Right now, in this exact minute, is anything actually on fire?
Most of the time, there isn’t one. You’re just still running the pace that used to be the only way to survive it.
P.S. If you’re ready to actually practice walking without a fire behind you, early pricing for the November retreat closes August 1st.