Part II: Stay With the Longing. Quit the Hustle.

Stay with the longing. Feel into uncertainty. Open to wonder. 

Longing is a Luxury Resource

In our western culture, many of us mistake the ability to hustle--to get what we want when we want it and how we want it--as our righteous duty. This is a mistake we hold in common. Not only does hustling limit and restrain the possibilities that are gathering around us as co-creators, but hustling isolates us and causes us to forget that our actions impact everyone around us as well as people in our global community. The symptoms of hustling cause us to behave in ways that harm ourselves as well as others. We buy things and do things that contribute to systems that were set up to oppress many while benefiting the few. And so in our hustle for all that social, monetary, and practical capital we unwittingly contribute to a pattern that keeps us running faster and faster as the inertia of this dysfunctional codependency complicates our lives rather than simplifies them. Hustling rarely, if ever, truly leads to the simplicity we all deeply long for.

Rather than hustling, we can choose to stay with the longing--the wanting, the hoping, the dreaming, and the open heart. I have come to realize that the real work is the work of refraining from grasping, grabbing, and gripping the first thing that catches my fancy to immediately feed the urge to become, to be full, to be whole. Hustling is inherently distrusting of others and the role they could play if we allowed the space of longing to linger. Longing trusts that if we keep the emptiness, the space, an unexpected guest will soon arrive and plant a seed that is far more valuable than anything the hustle will try to offer you in its immediacy. Hustling is the equivalent of the sugar high we experience when we want to feel a sweet satisfaction, but really what we want is the feeling of passion that is missing from most of our daily lives as we hustle for those very few resources: social, monetary, and practical. 

But the longing is a resource--a profound and valuable and limitless resource. The longing is a luxury that we are afraid to claim for fear of judgement from others who, deep down, want what we have found. Because our minds mistakenly think that we need more social capital than we actually do, we hustle so we can talk about the hustling life with others who, too, are in the thick of the hustle. We sense that if we were to stop hustling and invest in the luxury of longing that we take a social risk. And we’re right. Most investments require risk--we must lose something in order to gain something more in the long run. When we divest from the hustle and its return on investment (social capital), we invest in the longing for a return on investment that many will not understand and so they will not value it. 

The returns on investment for longing are immeasurable, which means they are infinite and truly limitless. When you invest in the luxury of longing and wait to see what life will bring, you will receive the gifts of surprise, grief and loss, growth, expansion, gratitude, joy, wonder, and awe. Longing is a relationship of trust with the things and people we have no control over--which is everything and everyone, including ourselves. When we invest in longing, in waiting, in dreaming, in paying attention, we could very well see an initial dip in our social, monetary, and practical capital, but we will soon find that we’ve been unknowingly sitting on a mountain of possibility that we don’t even have to mine or extract to receive its gifts. All we have to do is luxuriate near its streams and allow the surrounding environment to reveal ancient wonders and share with us resources the hustle has no access to. The ultimate resource is enough. When we invest in the luxury of longing, we will begin to notice that we already have and we already are enough. 

The Pain of Uncertainty is a Luxury Resource

“[Rilke] does not sugarcoat the necessary confrontation with pain in [his] letters but admonishes the recipients to use pain to reconnect with life...not to retreat into bitter loneliness but to recognize that life is also, and perhaps above all in the moments of intense pleasure and pain wrought on us by love and death, transformation. We should explore, as painful as it may be, in what specific ways a particular loss impacts our life. This will allow us to use our pain to transform our life, instead of being hopelessly subjected to the inevitable suffering. Instead of denying death and loss, we ought to explore more deeply what life has to offer in all of its dimensions.” 

- Ulrich Baer

The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

The Hustle keeps us in denial, disconnected with the true nature of life, which includes a steady dose of loss and pain to keep our emotional, spiritual, and creative ecology in balance. The Hustle is our mind’s way of taking action because the mind doesn’t know what to do with the pain signals from the grief of loss. The mind is not qualified to deal with pain--it panics when it receives the pain signal and wants to numb it and does not care to actually heal it because the healing takes more time and the mind simply wants the pain to stop, now. What the mind doesn’t know is that numbing the pain doesn’t make it go away. The numbing and denial from The Hustle cause complications that will erupt further down the road as paralyzing anxiety, debilitating depression, physical exhaustion and illness. 

The action Rilke speaks of is that reconnection to life. The Hustle requires us to ignore life and all the feelings and experiences that accompany it. The Longing, this luxury we have access to at all times and in every place, is the action of exploration and reconnecting to life. Longing is indeed a passive action, but this has value that we have ignored. Passivity is listening and asking questions rather than explaining, strategizing, and giving answers that are not fully informed. Longing is where we become informed, where we allow our curiosity to lead us on an exploration of our inner landscape where we will discover rare yet abundant resources that only we possess. The Hustle is the action of the mind; luxuriating in longing is the action of the heart and the gut. The mind cannot comprehend the ease at which the heart and gut find satisfaction. The mind never quite seems satisfied, does it? No wonder our minds accuse our hearts and guts of “doing nothing” when what they are doing is luxuriating in the beauty of life--they are savoring every bit as we allow them to nourish and refine our palettes as we taste the bitter as well as the sweet. 

Longing reconnects us. When we are longing, we are paying attention. We are eagerly anticipating the arrival of something or someone we have been missing. The Hustle wants us to magically make this thing or person appear. Longing trusts that whatever or whomever shows up at our door will be exactly what we have been longing for though it might not be obvious at first. If we treat our guests with hospitality and listen to their stories, we will find that we have been given something or someone that asks us to transform into the very person we knew we were deep down inside. You see, the longing is simply ourselves calling to us. We long for ourselves, and nothing else. We are our greatest resource, and our longing is our compass to find it. Once we find it, we will know intuitively how to use it. We just have to remind our brains that they are not in charge. 

The Holiness of Longing

When we feel lonely, more often than not, we’ve actually just lost ourselves, and our loneliness is our deepest self trying to reconnect in a situation where the mind thinks it is in charge and knows best. When we luxuriate in the longing, when we listen to the heartache, the elation, and the questions of uncertainty and curiosity, we will begin to notice our hearts and guts once more. We will approach our mind and all of its anxieties and rules, and gently but firmly remind it that we are quite safe and secure as we simplify our lives so that we can center our attention on the longing. 

The longing has secrets to tell us that will unlock our gifts, satiate our passions, and renew us over and over again. Stay with the longing. Ask the longing everything until it makes all the sense in the world. The longing is patient with us, yes? It comes back to us again and again and again. Sometimes our minds wish they could get rid of the longing, but the longing is faithful to us. The longing will not quit us. And so we must stay with the longing. It will ask our minds to stay in uncertainty and discomfort because the longing knows we must rediscover our wells of resilience, imagination, and ingenuity. 

“Longing is one of the most human of qualities. Like breath, blood, and water, we all share it. All people have a longing for something, and that longing is always a dynamic process that we must follow if we want to be led into our deeper life. Sometimes our longing calls to us from off in the distance. At other times it may get behind us and push us toward something. In any case it is something to pay close attention to, for to disregard it can only be to our detriment. We conjure great risk when we ignore the powerful prompts of the longing in our souls…

“What we long for speaks volumes about who we really are. Although surrendering to our sacred longings can sometimes be quite a painful soul-stretching and soul-tempering process...our longing, with its unique quality and energy, is also a magical state to befriend, for it is a trustworthy guide.”

-Frank MacEowen, The Mist-Filled Path

Glossary: places to stay

Longing: 
the thrill of anticipation--the tension of waiting, of resisting control and predictability

Uncertainty: 
everything is possible. avoid limiting ourselves only to the worst of outcomes.

Wonder: 
remain in the questions, the mystery, do not rush to answers. 
magic dwells in the unknown.