Sparks and Shining Dragons

A Valentine’s love letter to those who stay hopeful and curious when the world is changing faster than they can follow

🌸 ikigai 生き甲斐 is a reason for being, your purpose in life - from the Japanese iki 生き meaning life and gai 甲斐 meaning worth 🌸

There’s a Guillemots song I’ve loved for years. “Made Up Love Song No. 43.” In the middle of it, Fyfe Dangerfield sings this line that has lived in my heart ever since “love you through sparks and shining dragons, I do.”

I’ve never fully understood what it means. I think that’s why I love it. It sounds like someone saying I’m here for all of it. The dazzling and the terrifying. The things I can name and the things I can’t yet. I will love you through what I don’t understand.

On Valentine’s Day, that feels like exactly the right place to start.

I dug out an old blog post of mine this morning. Pre-ikigai, pre lots of things really. I’d written it years ago after seeing a quote about how impossibly lucky two people have to be to fall for each other at exactly the right time in exactly the right way… and I’d gone on this long, rambling, Sarah tangent about love and timing and all the near-misses that make up a life.

Reading it back now, sitting in the home Andrew and I built together, Henry Hound snoring at my feet, I found myself smiling for all the things she didn’t yet know.

The luckiest thing

Here’s the version of the story I want to tell you today.

Before Andrew, I’d loved people. Really loved them. But the timing was off, or we weren’t ready, or we were growing in directions that pulled us apart rather than bound us together. Sometimes infatuation felt like love for a while. Sometimes friendship was what it should have stayed at. Sometimes I met someone wonderful and we were simply in completely different places, and if we’d found each other at a different time the whole thing might have been different.

I got to a point where I stopped bumping into people I liked, so I did something that felt both scary and ridiculous. I wrote an extremely honest profile on Plenty Of Fish. What I valued, what I couldn’t tolerate, how I wanted to live. I figured if I was going to find someone, they’d need to recognise me from my words alone.

And then I waited for someone who had done the same.

When Andrew and I started talking, it became clear almost immediately that on our tiny Island, our paths could have crossed SO many times. Friends in common. Same quiz nights in different eras. Same little corners of the same small world. We’d been circling each other for years without knowing it.

But if we’d met earlier? It probably wouldn’t have worked. We hadn’t done enough growing yet. The lives we have now, the children we brought with us, the people we’d become, none of that would have existed.

So the luckiest thing wasn’t meeting Andrew. It was meeting him at exactly the right time, when we were both ready to show up honestly.

I raise a glass to the fairies and my guardian angel Nana Edna every time I think about that.

The sparks

I’ve been thinking a lot about this kind of luck recently. The luck of timing. The luck of readiness… and I see this pattern playing out between people and their AI tool adoption.

I know I need to dial my empathy levels down a tad, but I do genuinely have a heartbreak feeling about this kind of thing happening all around me. Brilliant people, people I care about, meeting something that could genuinely change their lives and walking away from it. Concluding it’s overhyped, or shallow, or nothing special.

They tried AI. It didn’t impress them. So they moved on.

There’s something I keep wanting to say gently and with love, the way you’d tell a friend who’d written off dating after one terrible coffee. You met it at the wrong time.

The AI that most people have experienced, the free version they dabble in, is a completely different creature from what exists right now. I know that sounds like hype. I know it sounds like the kind of breathless thing people say when they’re newly in love and can’t stop talking about how amazing this person is and you’re smiling politely while internally rolling your eyes.

I get it.

But there *has* been a fundamental shift in the last week or so (especially Anthropics latest model release of Claude Opus 4.6 on the 5th of Feb), and most people don’t know because they aren’t looking any more. They’ve already decided. They met AI before it was ready, or before they were ready and they’ve filed it under “not for me.”

I want to whisper to them the same thing I’d tell anyone who’d given up on finding their person. Try again. You’ve both grown.

The shining dragons

There is a Japanese phrase, koi no yokan (恋の予感), which describes the feeling upon meeting someone that falling in love will be inevitable. You haven’t fallen yet, but you can feel it coming. There’s a premonition in your bones.

I feel that when I watch someone use a truly capable AI tool for the first time and something clicks. Their eyes change. There’s this moment where the theoretical becomes visceral. Where all the articles and podcasts and LinkedIn posts suddenly make sense because they’re feeling it rather than hearing about it.

You can’t manufacture that moment for someone else. You can’t argue them into it. All you can do is care enough to keep the door open, to keep gently saying this is worth your time, and here’s why I believe that.

Which is, when I think about it, exactly how love works too.

Nobody talked me into loving Andrew. Nobody presented a compelling case study with metrics. I showed up. He showed up. We were honest about who we were and what we wanted. And then something happened that couldn’t have been engineered.

The best relationships have always worked this way. Human or otherwise. You do the work on yourself first. You get clear about what you need and what you can give. You stop looking for a saviour and start looking for a genuine collaborator. And then, when the timing is right, something extraordinary becomes possible.

The sparks are that first moment of recognition. The shining dragons are what comes after. The proposal you’d been agonising over for weeks that suddenly writes itself in an afternoon. The creative project you’d shelved because there weren’t enough hours. The breathing room to think properly about the work that actually matters to you.

Andrew and I on our wedding day, yes he is wearing a fez, fezzes are cool *grin*

A Valentine’s wish

I wrote a tongue-in-cheek poem once, long before Andrew, a sort of job advert for a partner. It started: “not looking for a saviour, I can do that on my own. The vacancy reads lover.” I was being playful, but I meant it. I didn’t need someone to complete me. I needed someone to show up beside me.

That’s how I feel about the tools I work with now. They aren’t here to replace what makes me human. They’re here to walk alongside it. To free up the hours I used to spend on the tedious stuff so I can spend more time on the thinking and creating and connecting that really matters.

So here’s my Valentine’s wish for you, beautiful souls.

I wish you the luck of good timing. I wish you the courage to try again when something didn’t work the first time around. I wish you relationships, all kinds, built on honesty about who you really are and what you genuinely need.

And I wish you sparks. Sparks that light something up in you, that make you lean forward with curiosity rather than pull back with fear.

The shining dragons? They come later. When you’ve been brave enough to stay.

Who or what deserves a second chance from you this Valentine's week?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - ✍️ Bullet journal reflection prompts

“What have I dismissed or given up on because of one experience at the wrong time? What might be different if I tried again now?”

“Where in my life am I waiting for perfect timing instead of creating the conditions for readiness?”

“If I wrote a brutally honest ‘job advert’ for what I need right now, professionally or personally, what would it say?”

PPS - 🌟 AI super prompt

“I want to explore where I might be stuck in outdated assumptions about a tool, a relationship, a career path or a habit. I tried something once and it didn’t work, and I’ve filed it under ‘not for me.’ Help me identify which of these deserve a second look. Ask me questions about what’s changed since I last tried, what I’ve learned about myself in the meantime, and whether the thing itself might have evolved. Be warm but honest. Help me see where I might be protecting myself from something that could actually be wonderful.”

PPPS - 🎶 Soundtrack this week: “Made Up Love Song No. 43” by Guillemots.

Here’s to loving someone or something you don’t fully understand yet, through sparks and shining dragons and all.