On Fire, Lately — #5

Hi friends,

You know how some months pass without leaving much of a mark — and others hold so much they feel like a whole year compressed into thirty days?

This past month was the latter for me. I finished the book proposal I’ve been working on for four years. The startup I’ve been pouring my heart into this past year has had some real traction. I committed to a six-month piano experiment, spent a few days in the otherwordly desert of Joshua Tree, and read several fantastic books (read on for a few of my favorites).

I also lost two jiu-jitsu tournaments. And, hardest of all, my dog Rocket passed away after seventeen years at my side.

Excitement, scheming, grief — everything has been turned up. Through it all, I’ve felt very alive. Definitely no grayscale living over here.

All of it has reminded me of something sports psychologist Mark Aoyagi told me when we talked about what it actually looks like to live a passion-filled life:

“Yes, there are great highs. But there are also great lows.” You don’t get one without the other.

The more we engage with life — the more we pour our hearts into things — the more we feel the full psychological weight of it. The highs and the lows come from the same source.

I don’t have a tidy answer for what to do with the lows. Maybe just feel them. And when they come, keep looking — because the highs are usually closer than they seem.

Here is a look at what is lighting me up this month:

• Rooster. Steve Carell plays a father trying to rebuild his relationship with his adult daughter, and they're both kind of a mess. It's funny, tender, and the only show I've actually wanted to watch this month.

• Afternoon walks with my cat, Rio. Apparently I miss having a dog, because I now take my cat on several walks a day. (She’s a Bengal cat, so she’s basically part dog, anyway).

• This color of red. A solid third of my wardrobe is this exact color.

• Heart the Lover by Lily King — This book is about love and loss and creativity and forgiveness and I loved it. (It’s also my favorite book of hers so far — it’s fun to watch as writers improve at their craft book by book.)

• The Midnight Train by Matt Haig — The newest book by one of my favorite authors. It just came out a few days ago so I’m only a few chapters in — but I love it so far.

• The Joy Series: Old Dogs by Joe Posnanski — My dad sent me this piece on older dogs and it made me cry. Dogs just become more amazing with age. (Maybe that’s true of most humans, too.)

The blank page is the problem. I’ve been reading David Epstein’s new book Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, and its thesis hit home: complete freedom tends to lead to unoriginal ideas. Constraints push the brain past its defaults and force deeper problem-solving. Total freedom, it turns out, is often the enemy of creativity.

I’ve been feeling this acutely with On Fire. This monthly letter is the most constrained format I write — three things I’m obsessed with, three things I’m reading, one thing I learned, one quote, one question — and it’s also the format I feel most free inside of. The structure does the heavy lifting, so I can just notice what I noticed this month.

Compare that to opening a blank document that could become literally anything. I just stare at the screen, paralyzed, until I can narrow it down.

“All parents should tell their kids they can be whatever they want. But after that, they should tell them: you have to live it every day. You have to work every single day. You have to embrace the suck, you have to embrace failure. You can't be anything unless you work every single day.” — Justin Gaethje

Is there a low you wouldn’t trade because of the high it came with?

Thank you for being here. I hope you do something that brings you alive today :)

With fire,

Krista