How to Live a Story Worth Telling (Part I)

Discovering who you really are, why you’re alive, and how to step into What’s Next follows a predictable path sages have been talking about for millennia

+ I’m hosting a free live meetup on how to live a story worth telling. It’s happening Thursday, May 1 at 10:00am Pacific Time. If you’d like to join me, you can register here.

Photo by Jordan Steranka on Unsplash

Modern life is complicated, but Life itself is not. It’s simple. It’s only our overthinking that twists us into knots.

Spirituality is simple, too, and the journey everyone takes appears to follow the exact same path. To understand the vast sweep of that path, you only need to understand a few things. Nearly everything else is extra credit or a scenic stop along the way.

Spirituality, as I mean it, is what we call our exploration of Ultimate Questions: What is Reality? What is God? Who am I? Some say these are the same question, and I tend to agree, but that’s a conversation for another day.

For now, let’s focus on the journey. Like all journeys, it’s helpful to know where we’re going.

When it comes to the journey of being and becoming yourself, you could devote your entire life to contemplating and practicing the essential first principles and that would be enough. If you did, you’d be practicing what I call Spiritual Essentialism¹.

I. The Nature of Polarity

The first thing is this: the nature of life is polarity.

Without polarity life has no charge, no energy. Nothing exists. The movement of existence is what polarity looks like. All of the perennial wisdom traditions point to polarity, and describe its aspects with words like:

• positive/negative

• masculine/feminine

• form/formlessness

• initiating/allowing

• actuality/potential

• immanent/transcendant

• incarnation/inspiration

Let’s make this personal and collapse these concepts into one idea: Human/Being.

You’ve likely heard this before. Your Being is your essence, your True Nature or soul. Your Human aspect of polarity is what Being looks like in space and time.

When I visualize the interplay of Human/Being, I see a plus sign (+). The vertical line represents Being, our relationship with the timeless, limitless Transcendent. The horizontal represents the physical world of here and now. At the intersection is a singularity, the collapse of all potential into you, your life.

II. Born Nobody

That singularity begins the same way for everyone.

At your beginning, you’re born free of language and a sense of identity. You experience life directly. There’s no mental commentary, no judgment, no labeling of anything. There’s only the immediate experience of living.

You don’t know you are you yet. Even if your parents have named you, you don’t know it or even what a name is. Some studies say that infants don’t know they are separate from anyone or anything else at all. They know themselves only as pure Being.²

Being is your natural state. If you could form a thought as an infant it would simply be, I am. This is the essential truth of your existence.

In a sense, you’re born as nobody.

That shifts quickly, however.

III. Becoming Somebody

Eventually, you learn language and come to experience yourself as a “me” separate from everyone and everything else. Your story as an individual begins, and you stitch together a persona³ or self-image to navigate life.

Along the way, you become somebody.

The “I am” clothes itself in “I am . . . a man, a woman, beautiful, unwanted, confident, the jock, the nerd, not good enough, smart, average, etc.” All along, beneath the mask of your stories, is your True Self, the Being that has never changed from the moment you burst onto the scene of life.

You join in the great modern Pursuit of Happiness. As you live your life, you become hypnotized by your persona, the demands of life, and slowly forget who you really are.

You come to believe that you are only the personality you’ve built and you seek safety, belonging, and meaning for yourself.

IV. Becoming Nobody

As you grow older a shift begins to happen, slowly at first and then all at once. For many, this shift begins between the ages of 35-40.

Life stops working. The search for identity, fulfillment, and happiness in external things—experiences, accomplishments, possessions, relationships—turns out to be an adventure in missing the point.

There’s a longing for a deeper truth, one you sense you already know. That’s because you do know it, and you’re beginning to remember it. But that remembering is a destructive kind of creativity.

What is often called “awakening” is a remembering of our Being. You venture beyond the stories you’ve believed about yourself and return to the essential truth that you are, you simply are.

Some people spontaneously, without any intention or seeking, remember this truth. Others come to it by way of a transcendent experience, a traumatic event, or through years of methodical, deep Inner Work.

This “waking up” is liberating, intoxicating. The transcendence of the Somebody that you thought that you were, but now see you are not, brings with it an experience of freedom, joy, and wholeness. You were blind, but now you see.

There’s a natural tendency to pull away from the way you used to live. The things that once motivated you shift. Your views on money, relationships, and ambition might change, too, as you devote yourself to Being more and striving less.

If your experience is like mine, you devour books, seek out experiences, and begin to prioritize allowing life to unfold instead of forcing things. Being, rather than Doing, becomes your new practice. And you’re good at it. In fact, you apply the same verve and commitment to Being as you once did to obsessive Doing and climbing the ladder.

For a while, sitting on a mountainside in contemplation seems like a good way to spend a life. But only for a while because another shift is coming.

You don’t know it yet, but this is the end of the beginning.

V. Becoming Somebody (Again)

If the journey I’m describing were a book, everything up until this point would be the Prologue. Now we come to the true beginning, the trailhead of What’s Next and why you’re really alive.

Here’s how it goes…

Eventually, being “nobody” leads to its own identity crisis. For many, myself included, shedding all the old identities you once clung to leads to a crisis of feeling profoundly untethered, lost, stuck, confused, frustrated.

At this point, you know too much. You no longer just want to be, you want to actually do something with your life. You know you’re alive for a reason, but what? It can’t just be about being, right?

You can’t go back to the way you once lived. That’s a non-starter. The Pursuit of Happiness that once motivated you has lost all its shine, and you can’t summon the desire to want what you used to want. Money no longer inspires. And fame or accomplishment? Meh. The old ambition has faded, but nothing replaces it yet, which is challenging because to stop wanting is to stop living and creating.

You want to be somebody again, just not in the old way.

Despite trying to figure it out, you can’t. This might go on for days, weeks, or even years as you try to be in the world, but not of it. You have days where, if you could, you would jack back into the Matrix. At least that was something.

What you want is to create a life aligned with your deepest desires, to integrate your Being (soul) with your Human life. Rather than doing things in order to feel alive, whole, and fulfilled, you want to create simply as an expression of your innate aliveness of Being.

You come to discover that Being and Doing are complementary polarities, and aren’t opposites or separate at all, but two sides of one coin. You learn the simple, practical truth that you are Being being human.

You are Being being human. Read that slowly a few times until you feel the texture of its meaning.

You are both fully divine and fully human, and you’re here to creatively express yourself authentically, fearless, and fully through everything you touch—your vocation, relationships, and your unique way of being in the world. The shift to this perspective is the first step on what many sages and teachers call the pathless path.

It is the beginning of the beginning.

VI. How do I get there?

If you find yourself in the phase I just described you might be wondering how to move into What’s Next. How do you move toward clarity of purpose and begin to live a story worth telling, which is the one only you can tell?

What does it look like to live as Being being human? How do you show up in the world with a clear sense of mission, purpose, and aliveness?

Over the past 30 years of personal exploration, I’ve discovered that all the world’s wisdom traditions, and even modern psychology, agree on how to move through this process of being and becoming, of living on purpose. Only in the past year as it become crystal clear to me and I want to share that with others in case it’s helpful.

That’s where we go in Part 2, coming next week, in which I’ll share what I’ve come to call The 4 Paths of Soul Rewilding. It’s a “map” of sorts that I’ve used on my own journey and have begun sharing with others.

If you want a sneak peek at it, I’m hosting a free live meetup Thursday, May 1 at 10:00am Pacific Time. If you’d like to join me, you can register here.

Either way, between now and we meet again I invite you to contemplate your own journey from Nobody → Somebody → Nobody (again) → Becoming Somebody Again. Don’t think about it, feel into it. Sense its texture and where You, the real You, are calling you next.

In my opinion, this is only adventure worth taking in life—the journey back to oneself.

Ever exploring,

Kevin

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1. I owe Greg McKeown a debt for inspiring the term “spiritual essentialism”. At the time I had the conversation with my friend, I was reading McKeown’s book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. On the surface it’s a business book about fulfillment, productivity, and purpose, but he lays out some universal principles that are easily applied to the “spiritual” domain. I’d also like to point out that some of the most potent spiritual texts in history have been the most concise, such as the Gospels, The Tao Te Ching and the Hermetic laws.

2. If you’re interested in the studies, this one is a good place to start. You might also enjoy reading this section of a larger piece on human development.

3. The Latin word persona originally referred to a mask worn by actors in the theater, which then came to mean the character portrayed by the mask, and eventually, the social or legal role one occupies. Your personality is a mask, and you have as many masks as you have relationships in your life. We think of our personality as fixed and unchanging, but it’s the least fixed thing in the world.