Stay With the Longing. Quit The Hustle. (Part I)

I’ve mentioned this before, and I mention it often, and I will not stop mentioning it: I do not hustle. I luxuriate. I stay, I feel, and I explore whatever catches my heart, my eye, and all my senses. And this includes the uncertainties as well as the beauties that capture my attention throughout the days. Recently, I’ve made it a practice to approach uncertainty with the same kinds of questions in which I approach beauty and wonder--rather than defaulting to an old habituated approach where I take a familiar road straight to catastrophic projections of failure. This new, more inquisitive, approach must come from the heart, where trust and desire are rooted, and where an environment of possibility is thriving. It is an approach of not only curiosity, but of gentle compassion. The questions I have for my uncertainties cannot come from my mind. My mind is a wonderful assistant, but I’ve learned it should never conduct the interview with this well-known guest of Uncertainty. Luxuriating in uncertainty turns out to be quite the fruitful harvest of indulgent epiphanies. Indeed, if we want to ripen, to be consumed, we must luxuriate in uncertainty. And this is no hustle. 

Luxuriating is how I do the inner work that few will notice and so very few will praise me. I will not have the social capital that my mind has been conditioned to think it needs. As with everything else, turns out I don’t need as much as my mind thinks I need. I don’t need a large social network that keeps my calendar full (social capital); I don’t need a large bank account to support a meaningful life (monetary capital); and I don’t need a long academic pedigree or the required experiences to speak up (practical capital). Capital, after all, is simply a resource--any resource. I quit hustling when I noticed that this approach to living caused me to value and pursue a very limited list of resources. I become vigilant about social, monetary, and practical capital and ignored my most valuable resource: my creativity. Which suffers the most when I am hustling. My creativity feeds off of luxuriating in the beauty, wonder, and, yes, even the fears and uncertainties, that weave through my life to create a one-of-a-kind tapestry. 

Hustling has a tendency to sneak up on me. I’m learning its pattern of attack. Hustling is a shrewd beast, and It often finds its way through to my well-conditioned neural pathways via the gate of genuine admiration, and I’m a sucker for praise. I, like most humans, have many interests that nourish my talents and gifts which result in noticeable accomplishments that reap a harvest of praise from kind souls. These kind souls often light up and ask me questions about my interests and accomplishments. I do indeed love this. I love the conversation. Anyone who knows me personally knows that although I am quite the hermit, once you get me talking about, well, just about anything, I can’t stop talking and I am consumed by a flood of ideas and I can’t help but take you along for the ride. This is truly the part that brings me joy--playing with possibility with another. 

But then something subtle happens. This kind and generous soul might start telling me how to market my ideas, how to get myself “out there.” This is when I begin to panic. This is when The Hustle obtains its undetectable grip. I begin to feel like I’ve been wasting time just writing because I like indulging in its magic, or just thinking about how similar I am to trees because I’m pretty sure I am a tree, or just talking with friends about the day we will be living the next phase of our dreams. Suddenly all this just-ing, which is really luxuriating, isn’t enough. The Hustle is subtle, but quick. Suddenly, I’m out of myself and emphatic that, yes! I’ve got to put myself “out there” like the books and algorithms tell me I’ve got to get out there in this digital landscape of polished perfection. The Hustle leads me down a dangerous road seeking for external validation rather than luxuriating right where I am, tending to my own orchard of curiosities that ripen slowly and in season. The Hustle demands the fruit now as proof of my effort and commitment, even if the fruit is tasteless and slightly bitter. It does not value the pace of luxuriating--which is my most rewarding rhythm that never fails to produce fruit sweeter than I could ever strategize or force.

And so The Hustle is a whiplash experience that I’ve finally quit because I see how it was spiking my cortisol as I heartlessly abandoned my natural pace of luxuriating, and put the panic of the mind that wants to be socially accepted in charge. Now, this nice person is truly doing nothing wrong with all of his or her advising, but my brain is wired to please, to fit in, in order to survive. The Hustle is one of my unconscious mental addictions for this reason: it pleases others because it’s surprising that a creative person has the ability to hustle. When did we creatives begin to think that we had to adopt a culture of “efficiency and productivity” in order to create?  More and more I remind myself that corporations are hiring poets, artists, writers, and musicians to enlighten them about concepts akin to flow--which is really just a euphemism for luxuriating and idleness. 

It is often jarring when, after maybe decades, we attempt or even think about quitting The Hustle. To suddenly adopt and embrace a life of luxuriating causes so much panic in our minds that we have come up with a gentler euphemism for our corporatized brains: flow. The Hustle of corporate life is the grim reaper of creativity--it will not survive very long in an environment that demands linear, rational, and predictable outcomes. Creativity thrives when definition, expectation, and assumptions are nowhere in sight. When we consider crossing the threshold from the familiar and seemingly secure boundaries of The Hustle into the wildness and ripeness of Luxuriating, we are overtaken with a tsunami of panic. What are we supposed to do with ourselves? Doing nothing is exactly what we’ve been afraid of doing. But doing nothing is when creativity is willing to approach us--She is a mysterious and sovereign muse who is looking for those who risk social, monetary, and practical capital. The anxiety we begin to feel is a sign of withdrawal from The Hustle--stay with it. Do not turn back. We must stop trying, and start luxuriating--even in the rush of uncertainty. Its waves will cleanse our blocked neural pathways and open up new ones with an onslaught of possibilities. 

The good news is, is that The Hustle isn’t my natural rhythm, and so I get to feeling very uncomfortable and overwhelmed and undernourished when trying to hustle. When I’m being a good Hustler, I no longer have time to sit with my uncertainties, my doubts, my joys, or my pleasures. I have to stuff them somewhere for a more convenient time in order to process them--and so they accumulate within me as I ignore them more and more and more. The Hustle has no time for the unreasonable bits of ourselves, and everything becomes misaligned as we misdiagnose and mistreat some of our most profound resources. We treat our loneliness with misaligned friendships and relationships rather than sit with what our mind has been wired to think is loneliness. We rarely get a second opinion from the heart or the gut. 

I have found that the initial diagnosis of loneliness from my mind is actually a case of being uninspired with work or another aspect of my life that my heart and gut more precisely diagnose. So rather than trying to treat my boredom with a social bandaid, I have to take the real antidote, and create something that inspires me. When we’re wrapped up in The Hustle, we rarely take the time to get a second opinion from the heart or the gut. And since we haven’t listened to our hearts or guts in a long while, we have a hard time understanding them quickly. They speak a language that we haven’t spoken, in some cases, since childhood. This is why it’s just so much easier to listen to the mind as we’ve been feeding its neurotic wiring all these years. When we shift away from The Hustle to Luxuriating, we have to learn a new language and listen to the heart and the gut. When I slow down and realize that I have a reservoir of internal resources unused, untapped, and unprocessed deep within my body, accumulating rather than flowing, I remind myself to open the gates of luxuriating creativity.