While the zodiac cycles on its ancient wheel, some years arrive with a crackle — a symbolic voltage that the culture senses and tries to read. In a special Lunar New Year episode of China Decode, Alice Han and writer Lijia Zhang sit with the Fire Horse: a once-every-60-years pairing last seen in 1966, a year that detonated into the Cultural Revolution. They ask a question that feels equal parts anthropology and prophecy: is this symbolism, or is it a lens on real political and social energy?
They trace how astrology, demographics and the everyday pressures of modern life — from falling birth rates to record Spring Festival travel — fold into a narrative people use to make sense of rapid change.
The Fire Horse becomes a story that communities tell themselves about risk, about childbearing choices, about whether to stay or to move. That story, in turn, nudges behavior, and so the symbol and the world it describes begin to co-create one another.
Currents
This week kept circling back to the same question: where is your energy actually going? It showed up everywhere. In the prana vayus—those five currents that move breath and life force through the body—the practice isn’t about forcing energy somewhere new. It’s about noticing where it already flows and learning to work with it. Integrating…
This week kept circling back to the same question: where is your energy actually going?
It showed up everywhere. In the prana vayus—those five currents that move breath and life force through the body—the practice isn’t about forcing energy somewhere new. It’s about noticing where it already flows and learning to work with it. Integrating the vayus means letting apana ground you while udana lifts, letting samana gather while vyana spreads. The whole system breathing together.
The same principle showed up in unexpected places. When your favorite tech company goes bankrupt, the community that forms around the abandoned hardware is practicing a kind of aparigraha—non-grasping—while simultaneously building something new from what remains. When you reclaim your feed from algorithmic noise, you’re doing the digital equivalent of pranayama: consciously directing what flows in.
Even the question of AI consciousness turns out to be a question about us. Are we present, or are we running on autopilot? The machine might just be a mirror.
And in the body: arm balances aren’t about raw strength. They’re about integration—shoulders and chest working together, force distributed rather than concentrated. Same principle, different scale.
Your library card, meanwhile, is a quiet act of resistance against the monoculture. Thousands of newspapers from around the world, free. The energy you put into seeking diverse sources comes back as clarity.
Direction matters. Where attention goes, energy follows.
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