Storyliving

Pursue a fun life. Tell magnetic stories. Change in the world.

Hey Reader

If you are a podcast person, you can listen to me speak about today’s article in the latest episode. It’s not an exact transcription of what’s written here. Some things I say below are not included in the podcast and vice versa. Sometimes I write my articles, then create a podcast and sometimes a passionate podcast leads to a newsletter where my thoughts are more organized.

They each have their own unique value and offer you a different experiences of my soul’s desire to share pieces of my truth in my path to living a happy and joyful life.

If you are interested you can listen on spotify, apple or youtube.​

Thanks as always for being here and if you have any thoughts or this sparks something from you, I always love to hear from you. I don’t claim to have it all figured out, I just hope my journey helps you along yours and when I get a chance to hear your thoughts or questions, our connection through these ideas deepens our understanding of our individual selves and we become one step closer to a more loving unity ❤️

🌳 My brother grabbed this book at the local bookstore that is something like “Zen and the Art of Walking” and shared this concept with me that sends a shiver down my spine each time I think about.

Next time you’re on a walk, imagine your life is two trees. The first tree is the day you are born and the next tree on your walk is the day you die. Now, how slowly would you walk knowing every step takes you closer to that second tree?

How much would you cherish every single step?

How much would you appreciate the breeze, the birds, the grass, the other people crossing your path?

Would you actually learn to fall in love with your hardest days knowing that pain is unavoidable and inevitable part of life and not something to run from or escape because that only gets you closer to the second tree sooner?

Would you learn to appreciate getting stuck in traffic?

Would you relish the moments your mom asks for your help adding photos to her digital picture frame?

What would it be like to fall in love with the sound of your coffee as it fills your mug?

Could you watch the next sunset or rainbow with a deeper sense of awe and wonder knowing you have no idea how many more of these you’ll get?

There is nowhere to rush off to be.

Life is here right now. In the challenge, the pain, the lightness, the love, and my favorite: the excitement of creation.

This is why I don’t use AI to write anything for me.

It’s like asking AI to have sex for you or play the guitar for you.

I have sex and play guitar because I love doing these things. Of course, I’d never ask an AI to do that for me. Yet, so many people offload their writing and content creation to AI?

Let’s play pretend for a second and say AI could perfectly articulate everything you ever wanted to say in one second and then you could post 3 pieces of content a day and you send out a genius newsletter everyday.

You are a content machine!

Your follower count is increases by the hundreds each day.

Your business is making more money than you’ve ever seen.

Now what?

Now that everything is working and you have saved all this time… what would you do with it?

I have to imagine you’d… oh I don’t know… do more of what you love??

Imagine loving tennis so much but instead of being present with practicing your serve or playing a challenging match, you just fast forward to the trophy ceremony hoisting the championship cup above your head.

What would you even be celebrating?

What would you even be proud of?

Is life really just about the next big achievement after the next and everything else in between is just in the way?

Or should I stick with my first metaphor and ask if you’d just like to fast forward sex to the orgasm?

Maybe you’d argue that creating content isn’t your version of sex. You’d much rather be doing your work. Your version of sex is guiding breathwork, or sitting face-to-face with someone actually doing therapy, or running, or painting, or making jewelry, or leading yoga, or hosting community events.

True, but when you are outside of your practice, don’t you also love to talk about it? Don’t you love sitting around a table with your homies talking shop? Sharing a new concept you learned from your mentor, the new shoes you bought that help you glide across the pavement, or where you sourced the newest stones for you next line of jewelry?

Content is the foreplay to your sex. It’s the part of process where you learn to connect more deeply with yourself by connecting with others. Physical attraction is one thing, but that deep emotional connection is why sex goes bananas.

The key part of the word foreplay is, “play”!

That’s what your content gets to be. A playground to test ideas, to see what resonates in your bones when you hit that post button and see what lands with the world.

It’s a testing ground for you to try on out outfits, stand in the mirror and see if you look sexy as fuck or not. Yet even the dressing room mirror isn’t the same as wearing that bold new t-shirt out in person. As you walk down the streets and are witnessed by others, your relationship to your decision to wear that bold new t-shirt changes.

“Do I look cool?”

“Do people like it?”

“Why do I need everyone else to like it so much?”

Social media is the medium where you get to try on bold new t-shirts. To throw ideas to the world and to check in on your relationship to who you are once the world begins to see you.

Just as you can chose to never wear the shirt again because people don’t like it, you can also keep wearing it simply because you like and you like this expression of you. Social media is the same playground. 95% of your videos are basically gone from the world within 24-48 hours never to be seen again. And you can choose to abandon an idea and a way of being or keep trying it on because you believe in it and love it.

Why not flirt with a bunch of cuties knowing not every convo is going to be electric, but ohhhh baby when you get in conversation with one that is 🤤🤤🤤

Why not see what it’s like to stop playing by the rules and to show up fully yourself and see how many cuties can reject you because why would you even want to bother with someone who doesn’t love all of you?

Think of your experience with social media. You don’t remember the videos that don’t resonate. You don’t hate the creator, you just move on. But the ones that land with you really land and you crave more from that creator.

It’s never the words you love so much as it is falling in love their essence and their way of being. But who are you being when you offload your essence to something that is labeled “artificial.”

Imagine how much additional practice you can get in at mastering your craft?! Not just your work, but the craft of being fully you.

This is your chance! To fall madly in love with learning how to fully express yourself. Not to hand it over to AI which is inherently designed to be an average of the whole human race.

Isn’t that what this was about in the first place?

Didn’t you start this work because you love it?

If you say no, then I would seriously consider following your heart instead of the dollar sign.

If you say yes, then I’d have to ask, where are you in such a rush to get to?

The second tree?

If you don’t love learning how to write and speak about your work (1) why are you doing it? and (2) the most important question of all, why are you lying to yourself?

If you really love what you do then you’d love doing it. Writing is the doing it.

If you love what you do—which is to say, love yourself—then why wouldn’t you fall in love with learning how to articulate what’s on your heart and soul in an effective and resonant way?

We have become so obsessed with efficiency that we have offloaded our soul just to get to the next task, so we can get to the next task, so we can get to the next task, so that we can get to…

I never even knew that I had spent all of my life desperately thinking that at some point the work will be done. I’d arrive and all my problems would seize to exist.

There are only two ways that day will actually come.

The first is at the arrival of the second tree.

The second is to realize there is nowhere to be except to learn how to be so fully yourself that you forget that there were ever any trees to begin with.

You seize worrying about the past and the future and are so invested in how this moment gets to be a fully expressed unapologetic version of you. And if you can do that with your relationship to social media, you can do it anywhere.

The process of learning to express yourself is the fun part of life.

These are the steps between the trees!

With love,

Matt 🌳