One windy evening we sat by the fire after dinner. The food was long finished. The conversation had gone quiet. And I was doing something I've always loved: just staring into the flames, watching them twist and settle and flare up again in the wind.
My wife noticed how far away I'd gone and teased me about it. I was lost in the fire, she said. I smiled, because in a way she was right. There's something almost hypnotic in watching a fire. It's never still, and it's never the same twice. It looks, more than anything, like life.
And sitting there, I thought about how many people I meet who've lost theirs.
How do you get your spark back?
You get your spark back by removing what has buried it, not by forcing new enthusiasm on top. The spark is aliveness, and it rarely disappears. It gets covered by years of coping, performing and living to other people's expectations. When those layers are removed, the fire that was there has air again, and it relights on its own.
That's the difference between getting motivated for a week and feeling alive for good.
Where does the spark go?
It doesn't go anywhere. It gets smothered.
Nobody loses their spark in a single day. It happens slowly, in a thousand reasonable decisions. You took the job that was sensible rather than the one that thrilled you. You stopped mentioning the thing you loved because people didn't take it seriously. You got busy keeping everyone else afloat. You got good at being fine. And somewhere along the way, the part of you that used to wake up excited about something went quiet, and you barely noticed it leave.
Think of a photograph left in a sunny window. Every year, a little more of the original colour fades. Nothing happens on any particular day. But one morning you look at it and realise you can hardly make out the face.
That's what losing your spark feels like from the inside. Not a crisis. A fading.
But notice what the photograph image also tells you. The original is still under there. The colour hasn't been destroyed, only covered by years of light. You are not broken. You are buried, and what's buried can be uncovered. Which is exactly why it's so easy to ignore for so long.
The fading also has a logic to it. Many people dimmed their fire on purpose, once, for good reasons. Being too much got you told off. Wanting things loudly got you disappointed. Being excited in a home that was tense felt unsafe, so you learned to keep your flame low and steady, where nobody would notice it. That was wise, then. It kept you out of trouble. It just never got the message that you're allowed to burn brightly now.
Why doesn't motivation relight it?
Because motivation is borrowed, and the spark is yours.
You can get a hit of fire from outside. A great talk, a new plan, an inspiring book, a burst of January energy. For a few days you feel alive again. Then it fades, because it was someone else's fire warming you for a moment, not your own catching.
The fire that lasts is self-initiated. It comes from inside, from wanting something for its own sake. That's what drives people to get up early without an alarm, to lose track of time, to keep going when nobody's watching. And that kind of fire can't be installed. It can only be uncovered.
This is why self-improvement so often leaves people tired. It keeps adding fuel from the outside while the real fire sits smothered underneath.
What does living without the spark cost?
More than it seems, because it looks like a normal life.
People walking around with no fire in their heart aren't failing. They're functioning. They go to work, pay the bills, show up for the people who need them. But something in them isn't thriving. It's slowly shutting down. They become a good fit in everyone else's plans, and a stranger in their own.
I see this often in people who've achieved a great deal. The outside is full. The inside is quiet in a way that worries them at three in the morning. If that's familiar, feeling stuck despite success goes deeper into what's happening.
How can I find where my fire still is?
Here's a practice for the next quiet ten minutes you have. It works best with a pen.
Write down three moments from your whole life when you felt most alive. Not most successful. Most alive. Don't think about it too long. They might be tiny: a night drive with the windows down, a conversation that went until sunrise, the first time you made something with your hands.
Now look at the three together and ask: what did they have in common? Not the circumstances, the feeling. Were you creating something? Free? Connected? Taking a risk? Being entirely yourself?
Then ask one more question: when did I last feel that?
Whatever answer comes, don't judge it. Just notice the distance between then and now. That distance is how much has been piled on top of your fire. It isn't a measure of what you've lost. The thing you felt in those moments is still in you. It's the same fire. It's just under more.
Do I need a big life purpose to feel alive?
No, and waiting for one can keep you cold for years.
Maybe you don't know what your purpose is yet. That's fine. In the meantime, don't sit in the dark waiting for the perfect fire. Find anything at all that lights you up, however small, and follow it. A class. A project. A conversation you keep wanting to have. Passion is healthier than waiting, and it's usually how the bigger purpose finds you. People rarely think their way to a calling. They warm their hands at a small fire and notice it growing.
What happens when the fire comes back?
You feel like yourself again, and people notice before you do.
When what's been covering someone's spark is removed, the change is rarely loud. Their voice has more colour in it. They start saying yes to things they'd quietly stopped wanting. They laugh differently. On our stories page, Talya Whitaker put it in words I've never been able to improve on: "There are no words for how this has changed my life, changed every cell of my being."
I love this part of my work more than almost anything. Helping someone's fire catch again leaves me feeling energised myself, because sometimes that's all it takes for a whole life to turn in a new direction. And it's never a new fire. It's the original one, remembered.
People often expect the spark to come back as a big dramatic feeling. More often it comes back as appetite. Wanting to cook again. Wanting to call an old friend. Waking up before the alarm because there's something you're looking forward to. Small flames first. Then, if you keep giving them air, a fire you can warm your whole life at.
If you'd like to begin uncovering yours, I made a free masterclass called Who Am I? It's a quiet place to start looking for the one underneath all the coping, the one who used to stare into the fire and feel completely alive.
So, how about you? What is your heart on fire about?
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.