The monkeys and the chestnuts

Zhuangzi tells a short joke about a monkey keeper in the state of Song. He was running low on chestnuts, so he told the troop: from now on you get three in the morning and four in the evening.

The monkeys were enraged. They screamed and shook the trees.

So he said, all right. Four in the morning, three in the evening.

They were delighted. The total had not changed by a single nut.

Everyone laughs at the monkeys. I've watched a hundred people do exactly this with their own lives in a single afternoon. The same workload becomes unbearable when it's framed as "you're behind" and light when it's framed as "you're starting". The same relationship feels generous one week and stingy the next, depending on which paragraph of it you were rereading.

Nothing about the chestnuts moved. What moved was the sentence wrapped around them.

That's worth knowing about yourself. Not to shame you out of feeling tired, but so you can catch the moment when a story is doing the work and you're crediting the world for it.

MOJOWAY is where that catching happens, in a real conversation, with the pattern shown back to you instead of argued at you. Growth starts the day you notice the story is a story.