April 14, 2026 • 25 mins
This week I asked my 4 year old a question that I realized was actually for me:
How much would it take for you to be happy?
As I watched him wrestle with this big question, I realized I have the same dilemma he does, the same dilemma all human beings face as we think about how we will love and live: do we surrender everything to discover love?
Or do we fight for what’s “rightfully” ours?
Do we defend ourselves and our possessions no matter the cost?
The conversation stuck with me and got me thinking about a childhood book I loved, about the Garden of Eden (of all things) and about what a life of meaning really requires.
Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, and welcome to you to write your Story pipecast.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Good job, really.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Pick up the pieces of your life, pulled them back
together with the word you write. All the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
You got the.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Words and said, don't you think it's down to let
them out and write them down and cold.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
It's all about.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
And write you write your story. Write you write your story.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast.
I'm Ali Fallon. I'm your host, and on today's episode,
I want to pick up where I left off last
week and talk a little bit more about why or
how this feeling of being at the end of yourself,
or this feeling of being at rock bottom, or a
feeling of kind of losing everything that you thought you wanted,
losing everything that matters to you, why it's such a
(00:56):
powerful initiation for the creative life, Why that is the
very essence and breath of creativity, and why creating from
there feels both impossible because you're like I have nothing,
I'm literally empty handed, and yet why creating from there
is so important, and why real creativity can only stem
(01:19):
from that, Like real creativity only is something from nothing.
There is commerce, which is something different where you take
money and you invest it and you create more of
what you have. But creativity starts in the darkness. It
starts in the chaos. It starts in the nothingness, and
there's something so powerful about that state. We avoid this
(01:42):
state with everything we possibly can muster like we do
not want to go there or be here. And yet
it is this very state of being that is the
birthplace of everything. The birthplace of everything living and breathing
is the womb. It's the darkness, it's the the nothingness.
(02:02):
And so I want to talk a little bit more
about this today, about why we avoid nothing, this about
what nothingness really is and what it means, and about
how this nothingness is such a powerful starting point for
creativity and for joy. I'll start by telling a story
about my four year old. This week, I had this
conversation with my four year old because I have a
(02:22):
four year old boy. I have a five year old
girl and a four year old boy. My four year
old boy, his name is Charlie. He is very into trucks,
like super duper into trucks, into construction construction trucks. He
knows the names of all the trucks. He loves trucks,
he loves playing with trucks. He wants the toy trucks.
He wants one of every single kind. Every Birthday, every Christmas,
every holiday, every time he gets a present, he always
(02:45):
wants trucks. And I think I told the story a
couple of weeks ago about giving my kids allowance, and
my daughter's like saving, saving, saving every little penny, and
my son is like, every time he has enough money
to buy a truck, he goes and buys a truck.
He just loves trucks. And the other day he long story,
but he ended up getting a gift from my mother
(03:07):
in law. His MEMI gave him this construction. It's a
crane truck, a truck with a crane on the top
of it that he's been asking for forever, and he
did a bunch of stuff for her, and so anyway,
she got him this truck. So he gets this truck
and he opens it and he's so excited to have it,
and then he looks at me and he goes, I
also want uh, and then tells me about this other
truck that he wants, and I was just like, oh, Charlie,
(03:31):
I've been trying to instill this in my children and
trying to talk about this with them, because they're very,
very lucky kids. They have so many people who love them.
They have obviously Matt and I who are buying them
gifts on their birthday and Christmas and that kind of thing,
but they also have just they have grandmas and grandpa's
and they've got aunts and uncles, and they've got all
these people who are constantly just buying them stuff. And
I do think it's different than how things were in
(03:53):
my childhood. I was definitely not getting constant presence like that,
and I just think it's different. Eighties parenting was different
than you know, twenty twenty six parenting. I don't think
there's anything wrong with it necessarily, but I do notice
that my kids have this like constant hunger for things.
And so I said to Charlie, how many trucks do
you think you would need to have before you felt satisfied,
(04:16):
before you felt like all full up on trucks, you know,
And He's like, thirty hundred million, thousand is what he
told me. So I was like, wow, that's a lot
of trucks. Where are you going to keep all those
trucks if you have all those trucks. And anyway, we
had this really like very sweet four year old conversation
about it. Then he was telling me later that day
(04:37):
he brought up we were driving around town running some
errands and he was looking at we were in a
part of town where some of the houses are bigger
than the house that we live in, and he was like, Mom,
I want a big house like this. I want a
big house, and I want a house with a big garage.
And I was like, you do Why do you want
a big garage? And he was like, because I want trucks.
I want a hundred trucks of my own trucks to
park in the garage. And I was just like, yeah,
(04:57):
I mean that sounds fun, Charlie, but I don't know
after a while, I think you would get kind of
tiring to have so many trucks, Like you'd have to
fill all those trucks up with gas and you'd have
to take care of all those trucks. And anyway, he's
for he doesn't really get it. But I am trying
to instill this value in my children that you don't
constantly need stuff and just for him to notice this
(05:20):
is more of what I'm getting at, for him to
notice how much he wants a thing, and then when
he gets it, it's he doesn't want it anymore. He
wants the next thing. And I've just been noticing this
in my kids and then noticing it in myself, how
much I want a thing and then I get that thing,
and immediately I want the next thing. And because it
(05:40):
was Easter and I was thinking about the Easter story
that I grew up learning, and I've been thinking a
lot about the faith of my upbringing and all of that,
I started thinking too about the Biblical story, the story
of the Garden of Eden. And I was telling my
husband how this has been happened to me a bunch lately,
(06:01):
where like I'll come back to a passage from from
the Hebrew Scriptures or back to a passage from the
Bible that I grew up reading, and I will read
it in a totally different way than I used to
read it, and it's like it's gaining new meaning for me.
And I just had this moment where I was like,
I kind of feel like this is what the story
of the Garden of Eden was all about, that it
(06:22):
wasn't like this thing where Eve sinned and then you know,
all of humanity inherited this sin. That is obviously an
interpretation that a lot of people have accepted, and who
a lot of people stand by that interpretation of that
particular story. But suddenly, when I was thinking about this story,
(06:43):
I was thinking, for me, the real takeaway of the
story is they had everything they wanted, They lived in
a perfect garden, and there was one thing they weren't
allowed to touch. And that to me, watching my four
and five year old have the same experience, I was
connecting the dots. I was like, Oh, this is the
(07:04):
human nature that exists in all of us. Is it's
never enough, no matter how much you have, it's never enough.
The minute you get something you want you want something new.
And I was like, wow, I really see that tendency
in myself too, And I started asking myself the question
that I had asked Charlie. I started, you know, just
like thinking through how much would I have to have
(07:27):
before I felt like, now I'm fully satisfied. Now it's enough.
And I really started to think that there is a
part of me that if I was that part of
me answered that question honestly, that part of me would
say never, it will never be enough. And so I
do think there's a wiser, higher part of us that
has to kind of parent us and say, you know,
(07:49):
there is a part of you that's hungry for more,
that thinks you need more. You need you know, bigger more,
more cars, bigger house, more stuff, more clothes, this and that, Like,
I'll be happy when I have the for this, or
when I can go on this trip, or when I
can do that thing. But I wonder if there's some
truth to this idea that you will actually never be
happy until you can accept that you will never be happy,
(08:12):
or that you will never have.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
All of it.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Does that make sense? Like you'll never be satisfied until
you can fully accept that you'll never be fully satisfied.
And for me, it just brought that old story that
I heard a thousand times before that now, like sometimes
when I would hear that story, I would just think
like shame, shame, sin, shame, Like I couldn't really take
(08:35):
it in in the same way that I could as
a child, or maybe I could, and I just was
rejecting that meaning. But when I thought about the story
this way, I was like Wow, there really is some
truth to this that we are so hard to satisfy.
What would it take? I was asking myself the question,
what would it take for you to be happy? Is
it possible for you to just be happy with what is?
Can you just look around you and go like, I
(08:55):
live in the garden of Eden, I have two perfectly
healthy children, I have a very happy marriage. I live
in a quirky you know, there are things about my
house that are not my favorite, but I live in
like a twenty seven hundred square foot beautiful, like well made, safe,
sturdy house. I have food in my refrigerator. I you know,
(09:17):
I have my mother in law living next door. I
have this beautiful relationship with her. There's so much about
my life that is garden of eden ish, And if
I could just focus on that and not focus on
this one thing over here that you don't get to
have because it's just slightly out of your reach. I
was like, Wow, I wonder if I could shift my
perspective and just choose to be happy with only what
I have that bumps up against my privilege, my entitlement,
(09:42):
my Americanism, my consumerism, my capitalism. I am you know, somewhere,
some part of me at least is a capitalist. I
say that loosely because I do see how problematically stage
capitalism has become. But I would have said before twenty twenty,
I would have said, before it feels like the political
(10:03):
landscape really shifted and changed. I would have said that
I am socially liberal but fiscally conservative. Now I don't know.
Everything has changed, and nothing feels like. Everything feels like
it's out of the category it used to be in.
So I don't even really know anymore how to define
what I believe politically. But I do see the big
(10:24):
problems with late stage capitalism and with billionaires, and with
the hoarding of resources. And it is that nature in
each of us that wants more, that always wants more,
that is never satisfied, that never feels like we have enough.
It is that very nature that fuels the billionaire to
keep on collecting and keep on hoarding. And it is
(10:47):
that nature in us that fuels us to overconsume and
to you know, constantly be buying the next thing and
working toward the next thing. And in many ways, it
is also that element in us that is making us miserable.
It is keeping us from our own happiness. So while
I was thinking about all of this, I was reading
(11:08):
to my kids one night at bedtime, and my son
pulled out this book that I'm sure you've read it
a hundred times, maybe not as an adult if you
don't have children, But the book is by Shell Silverstein.
That's called The Giving Tree. And I actually want to
read this whole book out loud, because if you haven't
read this book in a while, if you don't have kids,
and you're not in a regular routine of reading it,
(11:28):
it really just I mean, I had read it so
many times as a kid, it hit very differently as
an adult, and so I want to read this to you,
and I want to talk about it a little bit.
This is The Giving Tree by Shell Silder. Scene. This
(11:49):
is The Giving Tree by shell Silder's scene. Once there
was a tree and she loved a little boy. And
every day the boy would come and he would gather
her leaves and make them into crowns and play king
of the forest. He would climb up her trunk and
(12:09):
swing from her branches and eat apples, and they would
play hide and k sik. There's like this picture of
the little kid hiding behind a rock, and the tree
the tree branches, finding him behind the rock, and when
he was tired, he would sleep in her shade. And
the boy loved the tree a picture of him, a
drawing of him hugging the tree very much, and the
(12:32):
tree was happy. But time went by and the boy
grew older. He's sitting now with a girlfriend that looks
like or maybe a boyfriend under the tree, and the
tree was often alone. Then one day the boy came
to the tree, and the tree said, come, boy, come
and climb up my trunk and swing from my branches
and eat apples and play in my shade and be happy.
(12:55):
I'm too big to climb and play, said the boy.
I want to buy things and have fun. I want
some Can you give me some money. I'm sorry, said
the tree, but I have no money. I have only
leaves and apples. Take my apple's, boy, and sell them
in the city. Then you will have money and you
will be happy. And so the boy climbed up the
tree and gathered her apples and carried them away, and
(13:15):
the tree was happy. But the boy stayed away for
a long time, and the tree was sad. And then
one day the boy came back, and the tree shook
with joy, and she said, come boy, climb up my
trunk and swing from my branches and be happy. I
am too busy to climb trees, said the boy. I
want a house to keep me warm. He said, I
want a wife and I want children, and so I
(13:37):
need a house. Can you give me a house. I
have no house, said the tree. The forest is my house.
But you may cut off my branches and build a house.
Then you will be happy. Oh. And so the boy
cut off her branches and carried them away to build
his house. And the tree was happy. But the boys
(13:58):
stayed away for a long time, and when he came back,
the tree was so happy she could hardly speak. Come boy,
she whispered, come and play. I'm too old and sad
to play, said the boy. I want a boat that
will take me far away from here. Can you give
me a boat? Cut down my trunk and make a boat,
said the tree. Then you can sail away and be happy.
And so the boy cut down her trunk and made
(14:20):
a boat and sailed away. And the tree was happy,
but not really. And after a long time the boy
came back again. Oh this gets me so emotional. I'm sorry, boy,
said the tree, but I have nothing left to give you.
My apples are gone. My teeth are too weak for apples,
said the boy. My branches are gone, said the tree.
(14:40):
You cannot swing on them. I'm too old to swing
on branches, said the boy. My trunk is gone, said
the tree. You cannot climb. I'm too tired to climb,
said the boy. I'm sorry, side the tree. I wish
that I could give you something, but I have nothing left.
I'm just an old stump. I'm sorry. I don't Oh,
(15:02):
I don't need much now, said the boy. Just a
quiet place to sit and rest. I am very tired, well,
said the tree, straightening herself up as much as she could. Well,
an old stump is good for sitting and resting. Come boys,
sit down, Sit down and rest. And the boy did,
and the tree was happy the end. One thing I
(15:24):
noticed as I was reading through this book as an
adult is how at the beginning of the book the
pages are very short and there's only a few words
on each page, and as the boy gets older, the
text becomes much more complicated. I was just thinking about, like,
how wise we are as children, and how much we
overcomplicate things as adults. And this goes back to my
(15:45):
episode about like needing to fix every problem. It's like,
you have a problem in your life and you go
into hyperdrive hyper mode to fix the problem, and you're
trying every which way to figure it out, and you
want to get to the solution. And in many ways,
I think sometimes when we're spinning like that, we're actually
making the problem worse. And you can see this in
the story too, about this boy that the more complicated
(16:07):
he makes things, the more unhappy he gets, and the
more simple he makes things, the happier he is. And
I was telling my husband that, you know, reading this
book as a child, I always identified with the boy,
and then reading the book as an adult, I'm identifying
with the tree. And so I started having this hang
up with the book, even though it was making me
(16:29):
feel so emotional, I was having this hang up with
the book that I'm like, so is the moral of
the story that we're just supposed to give and give
and give until we have nothing left. And as I
was talking about it with my husband this morning, we
were saying, I actually think the moral of a story
is exactly what I've been talking about with the Garden
of Eden story, It's like the moral is asking ourselves
(16:52):
this question, how much will it take for you to
be happy? And are you willing to pillage all of
the resources of this earth, their pillage all of the
resources of your parents, or of whatever, of whomever of
the world, in order to keep on consuming, consuming, consuming,
until there's nothing left to consume. As the mother of
(17:14):
my children, I'm like, I would give them anything to
make them happy, So I'm resonating with the point of
view of the tree. I would just keep giving and
giving and giving, and the only thing that I want
in return is just their presence. It's being with them
is everything that makes me happy. And the boy knows
that intuitively too. He feels that same way as a
young boy, and it's only as he grows through his youth.
(17:37):
It's like as a child and as a matured adult,
as someone who's really been through their own heartbreak and
felt their own pain and faced their own darkness. Both places,
as that matured adult and as a child, there is
that same simplicity where this is all I need, all
I need is just to be with you, All I
need is just to be next to you. And yet
(18:00):
in that the middle section of life. As you grow
and as you move through youth and achievement and aspiration,
all of these things, there is this fuel that's driving
you that says, you know, nothing I achieve will ever
be nothing I achieve will ever be enough. And I
(18:20):
wonder if there's a place where we can get to
where we realize, Okay, if nothing that I can get
out there will ever be enough for me? Can I
find enoughness by going in? And this is where the
creativity really comes to play, because I believe everything is created,
Everything that we can make is created from that place
of enoughness. So I started last week's episode by saying,
(18:43):
as soon as your body switches into that survival mode,
you are not in a place to create, because you're
in a place to just protect and survive. One hundred
percent understandable. And many of us are in that place
right now, and I am one of them. I'm raising
my hand right along with you. And I finished the
episode by saying, the way out of survival mode is
to start creating again. It's to go inside to that
(19:06):
place of nothingness to say, you're the tree in the story.
I have nothing left to give, but I will give
you everything. I will give and give and give to
the place of nothingness. And I feel like this flies
in the face of our modern assumption around boundaries. And
I'm not saying that there isn't also like a place
for that whole conversation, but for a moment, like put
(19:27):
aside this idea of like I have to have good boundaries.
I'm only going to give in this certain way, like
you know, I'm gonna keep back plenty for myself so
that I'm safe and protected. Then I'm gonna only give
you a little bit. The heart of the creative person
and the heart of the highly matured adult who is
in the second half of life says I will give
and give and give until I have nothing left because
(19:50):
none of this fucking matters anyway, None of it matters.
All that matters is being with All that matters is
being next to you. All that matters is my relations
and chips. I'm not saying there's not a practical side
to this conversation too, where you do take good care
of yourself first. I think you could have that whole
argument unto itself. But for me, something about this is
(20:10):
feeling extremely profound to the part of me that was
blocked creatively. The part of me that was blocked creatively
was protecting and was holding back. I think there's like
a practical part, a human part, and then there's also
a spiritual part. The human part. Yes, set your boundaries,
hold your line, take good care of yourself, self care,
put yourself first, put your own oxygen masks on first,
(20:33):
and then take care of others. Yes, that's a part
of the conversation. Put that aside for right now and
have this conversation. Where you are the tree in the story,
the divine in You can give and give and give
until nothing is left. And somehow, when you reach the bottom,
the very bottom, where you have nothing left to give,
you have no more energy, you have no more passion,
(20:54):
you have no more inspiration, you have nothing left. Somehow
that the place where creativity comes from. Somehow that is
the very place where you finally have to go, Oh,
there's nothing left out there. So I will look in
here and realize where the gift was all along. And
somehow I think I'm in the process of reaching that
(21:15):
tipping point in my life, or maybe learning this lesson
for thee hundred thousandth time. I don't know, because I've
definitely been through this before, but I'm meeting myself in
this moment and going, oh, I can either protect and
close and fight for myself, for my family, for what
I want. Or I can open, or I can let
(21:36):
my own heart break, or I can be present here
and now, or I can see that I am enough
just as I am. I can share my heart, share
my heartbreak, and that can be enough. I can share
my branches, share my apples, let them cut off my tree.
Who the hell cares if you cut off the trunk
to my tree? To go build your boat, because in
(21:59):
that store, in the context of that story, I know
what matters. And sure, go ahead, cut down that tree,
go build your boat. You'll be back because you're going
to see that that boat is not what's going to
make you happy. And when you do come back, we'll
all be here together and get to enjoy the feast
of life together. And not to come back to the
(22:20):
religious imagery, but again, having Easter just pass and thinking
about the meaning of Jesus Christ and his death on
the cross is violent and horrific death. I was, you know,
just thinking through this imagery and like, what does this
mean to me now? And I was like, Wow, Jesus
(22:40):
really is the tree and the story. Like Jesus is like, yeah,
go ahead, take from me my very life, Like take
from me the breath and my body, take my blood.
Murder me on a cross for something, for a crime
I did not commit. Go for it. And what he
demonstrates through that, giving to the very end of life,
giving everything that he has, it's not good boundaries. He
(23:03):
doesn't demonstrate good boundaries. He demonstrates the utter corruption, the evil,
the greed of the empire, of the government, of the
Pharisees of the formal Jewish Church at that time. Like
he demonstrates how evil it is, how horrific it is,
how much it is making everyone who participates it in
(23:26):
it unhappy. And he demonstrates total surrender. And I said
this at the end of last week's episode two, that
surrender is the one thing I was unwilling to do.
These six years. I've been like, tell me what to do.
I'll do anything. I'll go on any mission, Like send
me a list of items to do, and I will
do it. The one thing I've been unwilling to do
is surrender. And as I have started to surrender, I
(23:49):
am finding the peace I was looking for. I am
finding the creativity I was looking for. I am finding
that the block I thought was there, it was an
invisible block, and it is being melted away. And I'm
finding more freedom, more peace, more abundance. All the things
I have been looking for by chopping down the tree
and going on my boat and wanting to go on
(24:10):
a trip and getting the hell out of Dodge and
trying to avoid my own pain and all of that
is here. It's all here. It's all here, and we
can all be the tree. So that is the invitation
of today's episode is to be the tree. To give
and give and give until you can't give any more,
until there's nothing left to give, to give the very
shirt off your back, to give your own life if
(24:32):
you have to, because you know that that is even
the breath in your lungs is not what is valuable.
That there's something more valuable than that, and it's about
the essence of who you are. That is something we're celebrating.
I'm celebrating that today for you. I'm celebrating it for me.
I'm celebrating it for us, and I will see you
back here next week on the Write Your Story Podcast
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Eight,
Hi, and welcome to you to write your Story pipecast.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Good job, really.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Pick up the pieces of your life, pulled them back
together with the word you write. All the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
You got the.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Words and said, don't you think it's down to let
them out and write them down and cold.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
It's all about.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
And write you write your story. Write you write your story.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast.
I'm Ali Fallon. I'm your host, and on today's episode,
I want to pick up where I left off last
week and talk a little bit more about why or
how this feeling of being at the end of yourself,
or this feeling of being at rock bottom, or a
feeling of kind of losing everything that you thought you wanted,
losing everything that matters to you, why it's such a
(00:56):
powerful initiation for the creative life, Why that is the
very essence and breath of creativity, and why creating from
there feels both impossible because you're like I have nothing,
I'm literally empty handed, and yet why creating from there
is so important, and why real creativity can only stem
(01:19):
from that, Like real creativity only is something from nothing.
There is commerce, which is something different where you take
money and you invest it and you create more of
what you have. But creativity starts in the darkness. It
starts in the chaos. It starts in the nothingness, and
there's something so powerful about that state. We avoid this
(01:42):
state with everything we possibly can muster like we do
not want to go there or be here. And yet
it is this very state of being that is the
birthplace of everything. The birthplace of everything living and breathing
is the womb. It's the darkness, it's the the nothingness.
(02:02):
And so I want to talk a little bit more
about this today, about why we avoid nothing, this about
what nothingness really is and what it means, and about
how this nothingness is such a powerful starting point for
creativity and for joy. I'll start by telling a story
about my four year old. This week, I had this
conversation with my four year old because I have a
(02:22):
four year old boy. I have a five year old
girl and a four year old boy. My four year
old boy, his name is Charlie. He is very into trucks,
like super duper into trucks, into construction construction trucks. He
knows the names of all the trucks. He loves trucks,
he loves playing with trucks. He wants the toy trucks.
He wants one of every single kind. Every Birthday, every Christmas,
every holiday, every time he gets a present, he always
(02:45):
wants trucks. And I think I told the story a
couple of weeks ago about giving my kids allowance, and
my daughter's like saving, saving, saving every little penny, and
my son is like, every time he has enough money
to buy a truck, he goes and buys a truck.
He just loves trucks. And the other day he long story,
but he ended up getting a gift from my mother
(03:07):
in law. His MEMI gave him this construction. It's a
crane truck, a truck with a crane on the top
of it that he's been asking for forever, and he
did a bunch of stuff for her, and so anyway,
she got him this truck. So he gets this truck
and he opens it and he's so excited to have it,
and then he looks at me and he goes, I
also want uh, and then tells me about this other
truck that he wants, and I was just like, oh, Charlie,
(03:31):
I've been trying to instill this in my children and
trying to talk about this with them, because they're very,
very lucky kids. They have so many people who love them.
They have obviously Matt and I who are buying them
gifts on their birthday and Christmas and that kind of thing,
but they also have just they have grandmas and grandpa's
and they've got aunts and uncles, and they've got all
these people who are constantly just buying them stuff. And
I do think it's different than how things were in
(03:53):
my childhood. I was definitely not getting constant presence like that,
and I just think it's different. Eighties parenting was different
than you know, twenty twenty six parenting. I don't think
there's anything wrong with it necessarily, but I do notice
that my kids have this like constant hunger for things.
And so I said to Charlie, how many trucks do
you think you would need to have before you felt satisfied,
(04:16):
before you felt like all full up on trucks, you know,
And He's like, thirty hundred million, thousand is what he
told me. So I was like, wow, that's a lot
of trucks. Where are you going to keep all those
trucks if you have all those trucks. And anyway, we
had this really like very sweet four year old conversation
about it. Then he was telling me later that day
(04:37):
he brought up we were driving around town running some
errands and he was looking at we were in a
part of town where some of the houses are bigger
than the house that we live in, and he was like, Mom,
I want a big house like this. I want a
big house, and I want a house with a big garage.
And I was like, you do Why do you want
a big garage? And he was like, because I want trucks.
I want a hundred trucks of my own trucks to
park in the garage. And I was just like, yeah,
(04:57):
I mean that sounds fun, Charlie, but I don't know
after a while, I think you would get kind of
tiring to have so many trucks, Like you'd have to
fill all those trucks up with gas and you'd have
to take care of all those trucks. And anyway, he's
for he doesn't really get it. But I am trying
to instill this value in my children that you don't
constantly need stuff and just for him to notice this
(05:20):
is more of what I'm getting at, for him to
notice how much he wants a thing, and then when
he gets it, it's he doesn't want it anymore. He
wants the next thing. And I've just been noticing this
in my kids and then noticing it in myself, how
much I want a thing and then I get that thing,
and immediately I want the next thing. And because it
(05:40):
was Easter and I was thinking about the Easter story
that I grew up learning, and I've been thinking a
lot about the faith of my upbringing and all of that,
I started thinking too about the Biblical story, the story
of the Garden of Eden. And I was telling my
husband how this has been happened to me a bunch lately,
(06:01):
where like I'll come back to a passage from from
the Hebrew Scriptures or back to a passage from the
Bible that I grew up reading, and I will read
it in a totally different way than I used to
read it, and it's like it's gaining new meaning for me.
And I just had this moment where I was like,
I kind of feel like this is what the story
of the Garden of Eden was all about, that it
(06:22):
wasn't like this thing where Eve sinned and then you know,
all of humanity inherited this sin. That is obviously an
interpretation that a lot of people have accepted, and who
a lot of people stand by that interpretation of that
particular story. But suddenly, when I was thinking about this story,
(06:43):
I was thinking, for me, the real takeaway of the
story is they had everything they wanted, They lived in
a perfect garden, and there was one thing they weren't
allowed to touch. And that to me, watching my four
and five year old have the same experience, I was
connecting the dots. I was like, Oh, this is the
(07:04):
human nature that exists in all of us. Is it's
never enough, no matter how much you have, it's never enough.
The minute you get something you want you want something new.
And I was like, wow, I really see that tendency
in myself too, And I started asking myself the question
that I had asked Charlie. I started, you know, just
like thinking through how much would I have to have
(07:27):
before I felt like, now I'm fully satisfied. Now it's enough.
And I really started to think that there is a
part of me that if I was that part of
me answered that question honestly, that part of me would
say never, it will never be enough. And so I
do think there's a wiser, higher part of us that
has to kind of parent us and say, you know,
(07:49):
there is a part of you that's hungry for more,
that thinks you need more. You need you know, bigger more,
more cars, bigger house, more stuff, more clothes, this and that, Like,
I'll be happy when I have the for this, or
when I can go on this trip, or when I
can do that thing. But I wonder if there's some
truth to this idea that you will actually never be
happy until you can accept that you will never be happy,
(08:12):
or that you will never have.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
All of it.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Does that make sense? Like you'll never be satisfied until
you can fully accept that you'll never be fully satisfied.
And for me, it just brought that old story that
I heard a thousand times before that now, like sometimes
when I would hear that story, I would just think
like shame, shame, sin, shame, Like I couldn't really take
(08:35):
it in in the same way that I could as
a child, or maybe I could, and I just was
rejecting that meaning. But when I thought about the story
this way, I was like Wow, there really is some
truth to this that we are so hard to satisfy.
What would it take? I was asking myself the question,
what would it take for you to be happy? Is
it possible for you to just be happy with what is?
Can you just look around you and go like, I
(08:55):
live in the garden of Eden, I have two perfectly
healthy children, I have a very happy marriage. I live
in a quirky you know, there are things about my
house that are not my favorite, but I live in
like a twenty seven hundred square foot beautiful, like well made, safe,
sturdy house. I have food in my refrigerator. I you know,
(09:17):
I have my mother in law living next door. I
have this beautiful relationship with her. There's so much about
my life that is garden of eden ish, And if
I could just focus on that and not focus on
this one thing over here that you don't get to
have because it's just slightly out of your reach. I
was like, Wow, I wonder if I could shift my
perspective and just choose to be happy with only what
I have that bumps up against my privilege, my entitlement,
(09:42):
my Americanism, my consumerism, my capitalism. I am you know, somewhere,
some part of me at least is a capitalist. I
say that loosely because I do see how problematically stage
capitalism has become. But I would have said before twenty twenty,
I would have said, before it feels like the political
(10:03):
landscape really shifted and changed. I would have said that
I am socially liberal but fiscally conservative. Now I don't know.
Everything has changed, and nothing feels like. Everything feels like
it's out of the category it used to be in.
So I don't even really know anymore how to define
what I believe politically. But I do see the big
(10:24):
problems with late stage capitalism and with billionaires, and with
the hoarding of resources. And it is that nature in
each of us that wants more, that always wants more,
that is never satisfied, that never feels like we have enough.
It is that very nature that fuels the billionaire to
keep on collecting and keep on hoarding. And it is
(10:47):
that nature in us that fuels us to overconsume and
to you know, constantly be buying the next thing and
working toward the next thing. And in many ways, it
is also that element in us that is making us miserable.
It is keeping us from our own happiness. So while
I was thinking about all of this, I was reading
(11:08):
to my kids one night at bedtime, and my son
pulled out this book that I'm sure you've read it
a hundred times, maybe not as an adult if you
don't have children, But the book is by Shell Silverstein.
That's called The Giving Tree. And I actually want to
read this whole book out loud, because if you haven't
read this book in a while, if you don't have kids,
and you're not in a regular routine of reading it,
(11:28):
it really just I mean, I had read it so
many times as a kid, it hit very differently as
an adult, and so I want to read this to you,
and I want to talk about it a little bit.
This is The Giving Tree by Shell Silder. Scene. This
(11:49):
is The Giving Tree by shell Silder's scene. Once there
was a tree and she loved a little boy. And
every day the boy would come and he would gather
her leaves and make them into crowns and play king
of the forest. He would climb up her trunk and
(12:09):
swing from her branches and eat apples, and they would
play hide and k sik. There's like this picture of
the little kid hiding behind a rock, and the tree
the tree branches, finding him behind the rock, and when
he was tired, he would sleep in her shade. And
the boy loved the tree a picture of him, a
drawing of him hugging the tree very much, and the
(12:32):
tree was happy. But time went by and the boy
grew older. He's sitting now with a girlfriend that looks
like or maybe a boyfriend under the tree, and the
tree was often alone. Then one day the boy came
to the tree, and the tree said, come, boy, come
and climb up my trunk and swing from my branches
and eat apples and play in my shade and be happy.
(12:55):
I'm too big to climb and play, said the boy.
I want to buy things and have fun. I want
some Can you give me some money. I'm sorry, said
the tree, but I have no money. I have only
leaves and apples. Take my apple's, boy, and sell them
in the city. Then you will have money and you
will be happy. And so the boy climbed up the
tree and gathered her apples and carried them away, and
(13:15):
the tree was happy. But the boy stayed away for
a long time, and the tree was sad. And then
one day the boy came back, and the tree shook
with joy, and she said, come boy, climb up my
trunk and swing from my branches and be happy. I
am too busy to climb trees, said the boy. I
want a house to keep me warm. He said, I
want a wife and I want children, and so I
(13:37):
need a house. Can you give me a house. I
have no house, said the tree. The forest is my house.
But you may cut off my branches and build a house.
Then you will be happy. Oh. And so the boy
cut off her branches and carried them away to build
his house. And the tree was happy. But the boys
(13:58):
stayed away for a long time, and when he came back,
the tree was so happy she could hardly speak. Come boy,
she whispered, come and play. I'm too old and sad
to play, said the boy. I want a boat that
will take me far away from here. Can you give
me a boat? Cut down my trunk and make a boat,
said the tree. Then you can sail away and be happy.
And so the boy cut down her trunk and made
(14:20):
a boat and sailed away. And the tree was happy,
but not really. And after a long time the boy
came back again. Oh this gets me so emotional. I'm sorry, boy,
said the tree, but I have nothing left to give you.
My apples are gone. My teeth are too weak for apples,
said the boy. My branches are gone, said the tree.
(14:40):
You cannot swing on them. I'm too old to swing
on branches, said the boy. My trunk is gone, said
the tree. You cannot climb. I'm too tired to climb,
said the boy. I'm sorry, side the tree. I wish
that I could give you something, but I have nothing left.
I'm just an old stump. I'm sorry. I don't Oh,
(15:02):
I don't need much now, said the boy. Just a
quiet place to sit and rest. I am very tired, well,
said the tree, straightening herself up as much as she could. Well,
an old stump is good for sitting and resting. Come boys,
sit down, Sit down and rest. And the boy did,
and the tree was happy the end. One thing I
(15:24):
noticed as I was reading through this book as an
adult is how at the beginning of the book the
pages are very short and there's only a few words
on each page, and as the boy gets older, the
text becomes much more complicated. I was just thinking about, like,
how wise we are as children, and how much we
overcomplicate things as adults. And this goes back to my
(15:45):
episode about like needing to fix every problem. It's like,
you have a problem in your life and you go
into hyperdrive hyper mode to fix the problem, and you're
trying every which way to figure it out, and you
want to get to the solution. And in many ways,
I think sometimes when we're spinning like that, we're actually
making the problem worse. And you can see this in
the story too, about this boy that the more complicated
(16:07):
he makes things, the more unhappy he gets, and the
more simple he makes things, the happier he is. And
I was telling my husband that, you know, reading this
book as a child, I always identified with the boy,
and then reading the book as an adult, I'm identifying
with the tree. And so I started having this hang
up with the book, even though it was making me
(16:29):
feel so emotional, I was having this hang up with
the book that I'm like, so is the moral of
the story that we're just supposed to give and give
and give until we have nothing left. And as I
was talking about it with my husband this morning, we
were saying, I actually think the moral of a story
is exactly what I've been talking about with the Garden
of Eden story, It's like the moral is asking ourselves
(16:52):
this question, how much will it take for you to
be happy? And are you willing to pillage all of
the resources of this earth, their pillage all of the
resources of your parents, or of whatever, of whomever of
the world, in order to keep on consuming, consuming, consuming,
until there's nothing left to consume. As the mother of
(17:14):
my children, I'm like, I would give them anything to
make them happy, So I'm resonating with the point of
view of the tree. I would just keep giving and
giving and giving, and the only thing that I want
in return is just their presence. It's being with them
is everything that makes me happy. And the boy knows
that intuitively too. He feels that same way as a
young boy, and it's only as he grows through his youth.
(17:37):
It's like as a child and as a matured adult,
as someone who's really been through their own heartbreak and
felt their own pain and faced their own darkness. Both places,
as that matured adult and as a child, there is
that same simplicity where this is all I need, all
I need is just to be with you, All I
need is just to be next to you. And yet
(18:00):
in that the middle section of life. As you grow
and as you move through youth and achievement and aspiration,
all of these things, there is this fuel that's driving
you that says, you know, nothing I achieve will ever
be nothing I achieve will ever be enough. And I
(18:20):
wonder if there's a place where we can get to
where we realize, Okay, if nothing that I can get
out there will ever be enough for me? Can I
find enoughness by going in? And this is where the
creativity really comes to play, because I believe everything is created,
Everything that we can make is created from that place
of enoughness. So I started last week's episode by saying,
(18:43):
as soon as your body switches into that survival mode,
you are not in a place to create, because you're
in a place to just protect and survive. One hundred
percent understandable. And many of us are in that place
right now, and I am one of them. I'm raising
my hand right along with you. And I finished the
episode by saying, the way out of survival mode is
to start creating again. It's to go inside to that
(19:06):
place of nothingness to say, you're the tree in the story.
I have nothing left to give, but I will give
you everything. I will give and give and give to
the place of nothingness. And I feel like this flies
in the face of our modern assumption around boundaries. And
I'm not saying that there isn't also like a place
for that whole conversation, but for a moment, like put
(19:27):
aside this idea of like I have to have good boundaries.
I'm only going to give in this certain way, like
you know, I'm gonna keep back plenty for myself so
that I'm safe and protected. Then I'm gonna only give
you a little bit. The heart of the creative person
and the heart of the highly matured adult who is
in the second half of life says I will give
and give and give until I have nothing left because
(19:50):
none of this fucking matters anyway, None of it matters.
All that matters is being with All that matters is
being next to you. All that matters is my relations
and chips. I'm not saying there's not a practical side
to this conversation too, where you do take good care
of yourself first. I think you could have that whole
argument unto itself. But for me, something about this is
(20:10):
feeling extremely profound to the part of me that was
blocked creatively. The part of me that was blocked creatively
was protecting and was holding back. I think there's like
a practical part, a human part, and then there's also
a spiritual part. The human part. Yes, set your boundaries,
hold your line, take good care of yourself, self care,
put yourself first, put your own oxygen masks on first,
(20:33):
and then take care of others. Yes, that's a part
of the conversation. Put that aside for right now and
have this conversation. Where you are the tree in the story,
the divine in You can give and give and give
until nothing is left. And somehow, when you reach the bottom,
the very bottom, where you have nothing left to give,
you have no more energy, you have no more passion,
(20:54):
you have no more inspiration, you have nothing left. Somehow
that the place where creativity comes from. Somehow that is
the very place where you finally have to go, Oh,
there's nothing left out there. So I will look in
here and realize where the gift was all along. And
somehow I think I'm in the process of reaching that
(21:15):
tipping point in my life, or maybe learning this lesson
for thee hundred thousandth time. I don't know, because I've
definitely been through this before, but I'm meeting myself in
this moment and going, oh, I can either protect and
close and fight for myself, for my family, for what
I want. Or I can open, or I can let
(21:36):
my own heart break, or I can be present here
and now, or I can see that I am enough
just as I am. I can share my heart, share
my heartbreak, and that can be enough. I can share
my branches, share my apples, let them cut off my tree.
Who the hell cares if you cut off the trunk
to my tree? To go build your boat, because in
(21:59):
that store, in the context of that story, I know
what matters. And sure, go ahead, cut down that tree,
go build your boat. You'll be back because you're going
to see that that boat is not what's going to
make you happy. And when you do come back, we'll
all be here together and get to enjoy the feast
of life together. And not to come back to the
(22:20):
religious imagery, but again, having Easter just pass and thinking
about the meaning of Jesus Christ and his death on
the cross is violent and horrific death. I was, you know,
just thinking through this imagery and like, what does this
mean to me now? And I was like, Wow, Jesus
(22:40):
really is the tree and the story. Like Jesus is like, yeah,
go ahead, take from me my very life, Like take
from me the breath and my body, take my blood.
Murder me on a cross for something, for a crime
I did not commit. Go for it. And what he
demonstrates through that, giving to the very end of life,
giving everything that he has, it's not good boundaries. He
(23:03):
doesn't demonstrate good boundaries. He demonstrates the utter corruption, the evil,
the greed of the empire, of the government, of the
Pharisees of the formal Jewish Church at that time. Like
he demonstrates how evil it is, how horrific it is,
how much it is making everyone who participates it in
(23:26):
it unhappy. And he demonstrates total surrender. And I said
this at the end of last week's episode two, that
surrender is the one thing I was unwilling to do.
These six years. I've been like, tell me what to do.
I'll do anything. I'll go on any mission, Like send
me a list of items to do, and I will
do it. The one thing I've been unwilling to do
is surrender. And as I have started to surrender, I
(23:49):
am finding the peace I was looking for. I am
finding the creativity I was looking for. I am finding
that the block I thought was there, it was an
invisible block, and it is being melted away. And I'm
finding more freedom, more peace, more abundance. All the things
I have been looking for by chopping down the tree
and going on my boat and wanting to go on
(24:10):
a trip and getting the hell out of Dodge and
trying to avoid my own pain and all of that
is here. It's all here. It's all here, and we
can all be the tree. So that is the invitation
of today's episode is to be the tree. To give
and give and give until you can't give any more,
until there's nothing left to give, to give the very
shirt off your back, to give your own life if
(24:32):
you have to, because you know that that is even
the breath in your lungs is not what is valuable.
That there's something more valuable than that, and it's about
the essence of who you are. That is something we're celebrating.
I'm celebrating that today for you. I'm celebrating it for me.
I'm celebrating it for us, and I will see you
back here next week on the Write Your Story Podcast
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Eight,
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