Transitions

It is a time of year for transitions. Several days ago, the winter solstice marked the transition where the days began to grow longer meaning more daylight and less darkness. Also, we find ourselves at the ending of another year, and we’ll soon transition into a new one that holds much promise.

But the transitions that occur now are more subtle and more internal than the other transitions that happen throughout the rest of the year. The leaves have long since fallen, and the natural world seems somewhat lifeless, except for the scurry of small animals and birds trying to find the food that will sustain them through this time. It’s a time of dormancy and hibernation — a saving up and storing up of energy as to be ready when spring comes for new growth and an explosion of energy. It is a season to hide away and rest.

This time of year isn’t about making big bold changes, though so many folks make those big New Year’s resolutions. They never seem to last simply because the time isn’t right. It’s a time to make ready, to prepare, to sustain oneself until the conditions are right. And that is how I am feeling. I feel that big change and transition are coming, and it’s going to be something amazing and beautiful. It’ll be here before I know it, but I don’t know exactly what it will be. But it’s coming. I feel it mounting inside, and just as the days grow longer, the feeling grows stronger. For now, I am slowing down, gathering my resources, and sustaining myself through this time.

I prepare and reflect and make ready for a coming spring when new life, new growth, new energy can push forth. It may not look like it, but it’s a time of transition.

Hustle

I’m done hustling, and I’m done with the hustle. Now, I don’t mean the 1975 disco song by Van McCoy and the Soul City Symphony. I’m done with hustling when it comes to my art, my creativity, and my making a living.

Now you may think that adopting this attitude is a bad move for someone who is out there trying to make it on his own — trying to do the freelance, self-employed thing. After all we hear the word “hustle” all the time from the business sector, and the side hustle has become an established thing for folks to make a bit of cash on the side. Just go to Amazon, and look up the word “hustle” and search just the books. You’ll find book after book, mostly business related, that extoll the virtues of hustling and the hustle as a means of making it in business and entrepreneurship. You’ll find an equal number that tell you how you can make it big with your side hustle, as well. So there seems to be a lot of folks who believe that you have to hustle in order to get what you want.

However, I’ve come to dread the word, and I’ve used it plenty of times to describe my efforts over the past five years since I left teaching and went out on my own as an artist, creator, and instructor. For me, the word “hustle” has always rung with a certain negativity and has always left a bad taste in my mouth. Now others talk about their hustle in glowing terms and see it as something to applaud. They see it as a key to success, but I’m done with it.

Hustling over the past five years has left me tired and worn out, and it hasn’t gotten me very far. It has been the times when I’ve slowed down and taken a step back that I’ve actually made my biggest strides. I think that’s because, at it’s best, hustling is about being energetic and doing something with speed, but at it’s worse, it’s about being aggressive, forceful, and dishonest.

Though there are those that glamorize hustle and hold it up as the be all and end all of making it in the world today, I just can’t help wonder how we got to the point where we think that doing something as quickly as possible is always better. See, every definition of hustle mentions energy, force, or speed, but they tellingly leave out words like efficiency and effectiveness. I can’t help thinking about my elementary school math classes where students rushed through a practice sheet or a test just so that they could be the first ones finished and be the first to yell out, “I’m done.” There was never a reward or a prize at being the first one finished, and rarely did these students receive top marks, myself included when I hustled through the math problems, because inevitably, mistakes were made and problems missed.

We have this notion that we have to do something as quickly as possible. I know much of it has to do with capitalism and making money. After all, “Time is money,” people always say, but speed does not necessarily mean good. Yes, the experienced potter can throw a cup more quickly than the novice, but that speed is earned through diligence, practice, and experience. It’s not simple a matter of doing it quickly for the sake of doing it quickly. Yet we still praise speed, quickness of action, and hustle, and as our world has sped up and gotten more competitive, we have only gotten more enamored with hustle.

Besides the speed issue, there’s the whole implication of hustle as something aggressive, pushy, dishonest, and at worst, illicit. Do I really want to be seen that way be people that I’m trying to serve — people that I care about? I do want them to buy my art or take a class with me, but I don’t want to push, cajole, or harass them. I want them to do those things because what I do resonates with them. I’m not looking to push them away with aggressive marketing ploys and an endless stream of spam. Besides, hustling saps me of my energy, and it seems so inefficient as I end up expending far too much energy for far too small of a return.

So. I am done with hustling. It doesn’t mean that I’m not working hard or not working at all. I’m not sitting back and just letting things be what they’re bound to be. I’m simply devoting the time and the energy that I would to hustling into making better work and deeper work. I want to connect with folks on a deeper level and create a sense of community, not hustle for their attention. I want to serve these people, not market to them — not hustle them out of money.

It’s about connection and community and not about seeking attention, and so, I am done with hustling.

Why Do We Create?

Why do we create?

That’s a question that popped up at the end of my morning meditation, and I just had to sit down and ponder the power of that simple questions..

I think we create for many reasons. We create for shear joy, to express a feeling or an idea, to practice a skill or learn a technique, to be like people we admire. There are so many reasons why we create, but I think the main reason that we create is simply that it’s in our programming. As human beings we are programmed to create, and when I say create, I don’t just mean crating art, though I am a visual artist, I mean building, cooking, writing, designing, singing, dancing, making, and so much more. When we create we are solving a problem. We’re making food for to feed our bodies. We’re writing music to feed our souls. We’re expressing a personal truth that we want to get from our heads to someone else’s. We’re building a business to serve a specific need.

We are constantly presented with problems, and we use our creativity to solve them. But nowadays, so many of our problems are simply solved by buying something online or in a store or by paying someone else to solve them for us, and we don’t have to use our creativity and problem solving skills like we once did. Long before Amazon and Target and supermarkets and fast food chains, we had to solve our problems by making and creating things ourselves. We built our homes, sewed our clothes, baked our bread, planted our food. We were constantly making and creating because it was just part of our day-to-day life as a means of survival.

But over time we lost that daily making and creating, and now we are mostly consuming. We buy — we watch — we listen. We consume and consume. But there is still this innate need inside to create. I think it explains the plethora of DIY shows, channels, and videos. I think it explains the popularity of those reality competition shows where folks bake, or cook, or blow glass. We want to create, but we’re still stuck in consume mode, and it’s easier to watch others create than it is for us to do something ourselves. But we still dream of being creators.

It’s a natural part of who we are. We have somehow become disconnected to it. We have shut ourselves off from it, and we find excuse after excuse to not even try. We have convinced ourselves that it’s easier to stay disconnected from a crucial part of ourselves than it is to risk becoming fully who we are and live up to our greatest potential. We continue to feel incomplete. We feel like something is missing — that there’s a deep part of us buried and calling to us, but we don’t want to take the risk.

Why? Why won’t we take the steps to connect with that part of ourselves?

Fear. We are afraid that we’ll suck at it. We’re afraid that others will laugh at us and make fun of us. We fear that we won’t be as good as someone else — that we’ll never measure up. We fear that we’ll be discovered and found out as frauds and creative charlatans. We fear that what we want to say is worthless. We fear that we will fail. We fear so much, and so we stay in our comfortable little bubbles and consume and consume and dream and dream. All the while, we feel disconnected and incomplete.

It takes courage and vulnerability to create. What would it look like — what would it feel like — if the world supported us in this fragile state? What if we felt the fear and did it anyway?

We risk connecting with ourselves and showing up as fully ourselves when we dare to create, and we may just find that others will support and encourage us and that we may just inspire others. It’s a risk we should be willing to take.

So make, create, build, sing, dance, draw, paint, write, learn, connect, and become. It’s part of who you are!

Socially Awkward

I am socially awkward.

I have always been that way, and my mom tells a story of how I stood on the steps as a little kid watching my brother and sister and the neighbor kids playing below. I was probably three or four years old, and I stood at the top of the tall steps smiling and giggling at their antics, and when my mom came over to me and told me that I could go down and play with the others and join in the fun, I said no that I was fine where I was. So, I stayed in my spot as observer watching the others.

I remember the middle school and high school dances, and there was nothing more nerve racking and perilous for me. I was fine with a small group of my buddies, but interacting with so many other kids who sat or stood around in small groups and cliques chatting about this and that was truly dreadful. But nothing was worse than the sight of whatever girl I was crushing on at that moment. It was enough to tie my tongue and have my heart leap into my throat, and of course she was always with two or three of her friends, making it impossible to catch her by herself. Too often the dances ended with me simply staring longingly and never getting up the courage to ask her to dance.

Even to this day, I’m not comfortable at parties. I hate small talk, and find it tedious and boring, and too often I find myself standing alone, drink in hand wondering why everyone else seems to have a natural gift for fitting in and talking about simple things. I think that I’ve gotten better at it, but it’s so taxing.

Even in today’s age of social media where you’re always just a few keystrokes away from a witty remark or a thought-provoking anecdote, I find myself fumbling for words and more than often than not, avoiding the conversation all together. Many others can don a new persona, a new way of being in these virtual places and really thrive. They feel much more at ease with a screen between themselves and others as they chat it up.

But social media is draining to me, and I find it difficult to navigate and still very awkward. Social media is like a party to me. I see folks talking, but find it hard to interject myself into the conversation. Too often I stand and listen from a virtual distance, wondering why everyone else seems so much more at ease. 

It’s not natural to me, and scrolling through my feed feels like strolling around at a party — different conversations in different cliques of people. I circle again and again eavesdropping on the conversations hoping to hear a sentence or a phrase that not only catches my attention, but that can pull me into the conversation. Sometimes I hear something and I play interloper as I pony up my two cents and quickly retreat back into a darkened corner of cyberspace, hoping and waiting for someone to engage me. But it seems so strange and so challenging.

Social media is a strange and mysterious place for someone who is socially awkward.