Tiny Revolutions №125: On blowing up your life

what we discover in the falling 🍂

Sunset over downtown Los Angeles, November 26, 2025

Someone recently asked me if it was bad that they were considering blowing up their life. As a person who has blown up their own life multiple times, my response was something like, well, I am a person who has blown their life up a bunch of times, so obviously I’m a fan.

But more broadly, what does it even mean to blow up one’s life? The use of the phrase “blow up” implies that it’s negative; like you’re detonating something that was chugging along just fine. But what if a detonation is what’s warranted?

Was it bad when I quit my job at Sony in the winter of 2005 and left New York City to return to Atlanta to live with my parents? My NYC life was a good life, and the prospects seemed great in lots of ways. Was it bad when, a few months later, I turned down a really good job offer in Atlanta and decided instead to move to LA with not much beyond a beater car and a few thousand bucks in savings?

Both were more or less rash moves; I didn’t have a master plan in mind, I just knew that was how it had to be. I’ve done this many times. I once broke up with a very good man because even though most of the time we got along great, there was one week of the month where I couldn’t stand him.

I had to leave NYC because I didn’t want to have a New York life as I saw it laid out before me. I didn’t want to have an Atlanta life because I didn’t like what I saw laid out for me there either. And I sure as hell didn’t like the life I saw with that guy, one where for a full quarter of our time together I wanted nothing to do with him. Surely this was hormonal and I suspect a lot of people would have just accepted it as the price of being in a relationship with a good and stable man who loved them, but I have never been great at compromise. When I ended things he said he was worried about me and told me he’d keep the light on for me. I thanked him. But I knew I wouldn’t be back.

At the time I was living in a neighborhood that had a lot of hills, and shortly after the breakup I was driving over one of them at sunset, windows open, warm air rushing around me. I was 38 years old and I thought, “I don’t think I’ll find another guy to marry and have children with in time for me to do it naturally.” It felt true then and it ended up being true. There was death in that moment; I knew I was killing something. But the light was so beautiful; my life was so beautiful. I didn’t regret that choice then and I don’t regret it now, eleven years later.

To get up off the ground you always have to use the ground. Unless you have to use space. Or, you know, something else entirely. I think we only discover what in the falling.

I wrote the essay above to serve as commentary for my teacher Dave Cuomo’s/

Angel City Zen Center

’s new translation of Dogen’s Inmo, a famous Zen text. Here’s the relevant portion:

There’s a saying that’s come to down to us from antiquity, come down to us from the West, come down to us from the Heavens above:

When you fall down because of the ground
You get back up by using the ground
Trying to get up without using the ground
Is impossible

That saying has been held up and revered as a great revelation - it’s the way body and mind drops off… But still, if we only understand it like this and don’t go on to understand it not like this, it’s like we haven’t studied the saying at all. Actually there is only one possible way to get up:

If you fall down because of the ground,
you have to get up by using space
trying to get up without using space
ultimately makes no sense

If you fall down because of space
you have to get up by using the ground
trying to get up without using the ground
ultimately makes no sense

If you don’t yet understand these words, you don’t yet know how to measure ground and space in the buddhist way.

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I love Thanksgiving so much! Truly. But it always makes me a little sad for the life I didn’t have. I hope wherever you are, you’re feeling at peace.

I’m grateful for so many things, one of which is you. Thanks for reading, as ever.

😘

Sara

p.s. If this resonated, tap the heart or share it with someone who needs it.