—
I’m going to see if I can write this without hustling. Without defaulting to questions about how I’ll finish it, or where I might publish it. Inevitably, I’ve already gone there, as has been the habit before writing or working. I’ve been in the hustle. I bet you have too.
But I just took a salt bath at 2:00 in the afternoon on a weekday, after sleeping until 9:30 for the first time in as long as I can remember, while my son is presently sitting quietly beside me painting watercolors.
Because this is COVID_19. We are well, thankfully, and live in a rural area on a farm. We are honestly reveling in the pause. My son recently said, “Mom, no one wants things to go back to normal.” We feel a reset happening. He’s eleven and he is thankful for all the time outside of school to just be a kid. I’m grateful for the deep shifts in my body and nervous system.
This is COVID_19, and I am sensing in every way that I sense things – this is where the hustle came to die.
Or maybe the hustle died at 3 AM today when I was lying awake, staring down the damn hustle, just hours after hosting an online women’s group on how this is the time for the sacred feminine to anchor into female bodies. I feel it, intuit it. I know that this is a deep time of change and I am living it and watching it closely in the collective.
I taught in the group how the hustle, the perpetual motion, and striving in our society, the urge to compulsively do something (even self-improvement), is rooted in a wounded masculine archetypal orientation. We all have it inside of us regardless of our gender. As a culture, we have been handed messages of individualism and being self-made. We’ve been told that perpetual hard work is the door to some damn panacea.
A panacea we never found in the hustle. Instead, we collectively found a lot of debt, a lot of anxiety, divorce, confusion, suicide, feelings of inadequacy, addiction & adrenal fatigue – to name a few common ones.
We knew deep inside that it wasn’t working. We knew it before Coronavirus, but most people just kept going. Kept hustling.
And now, a pandemic. A pause button for most. A pause button the size of the whole world pushed on production, accumulation, motion, and even greed. A pause button pushed on the hustle.
And here we discover that what many are seeing as a great disruptor may be the remedy – to the hustle that hasn’t until now, stopped inside the patriarchy.
The hustle shows up for me as a mental search to know the best right thing to do, the next thing to do. Like I’m trying to beat the end game. I don’t want to do this, necessarily, it is habitual. It’s some attempt to control the variables that are ultimately not mine to control, whether emotional, financial, relational, or how someone responds to my work.
We hustle in an effort to make life do something that we want it to do. The alternative would be to pause, to observe life, to lovingly make peace with it. To take in all of the details, and when the time is right, make a decision and execute it without wasted energy. This is the healthy masculine, archetypally speaking. I also do this, but even my previous pauses have been inside a life of hustle.
I was pretty surprised after I’d purposefully left a career where the hustle ruled me, a story I tell in my TEDx, to begin an entrepreneurial life to find myself still hustling pretty far into it. I thought that if I just got out of the hierarchical climb, out of the rat race, that I would do it differently.
But entrepreneurial life is still fast, and there are still demands, and there is no paycheck for just showing up. You need to make it all happen. Or… something like that. You do need to show up and you do need to take action, but no one actually needs to hustle.
As an entrepreneur, I found over a year into it that I was still attempting to do too much in an effort to control the outcomes, still struggling to accept things as they are, still trying to push things to work, when sometimes, the launch was just going to fail and no amount of hustle was going to get it to fly.
(In transparency, I have made it this far in the first draft without thinking about the future outcome of this article.)
When we don’t know how we are going to get our needs met, or our wants met, as is the case at times in a creative, entrepreneurial life, or during a pandemic, or, truly, most of the time, we very commonly start to frenetically DO more instead of pausing to feel into the pause. Into what really wants to happen, and to allow that to inform what we do next.
In terms of the archetypal feminine and masculine, it’s the feminine that pauses, collects information, feels the feelings, and is willing to go to the darkness or discomfort of what is.
You can look at your situation now and reflect on what your response is to this pause that is quarantine that is out of our control. Are you hustling? Are you struggling to slow down and you feel that in your body? Are you overeating and consuming alcohol in an effort to numb?
The archetypal feminine does not hustle. Rather, it gathers, nourishes, and rests. It is the invitation behind salt baths in the afternoon, and sleeps until nourished, in my case this morning, until 9:30 am after a bout of insomnia in the middle of the night.
And in the middle of the night, what I was doing was staring down the hustle. I saw into my thoughts that told me I “should” be seeing things differently regarding a stressful situation. I was confronting self-doubt that I could handle the situation. I was just feeling. And I had to face the urge to hustle. To face the voice that said, “Get up and journal, get up and improve yourself in some way, and then the situation will feel better.” Even self-improvement can be rooted in a hustle.
I faced it all. All of the emotions as well as the urges to do something about the emotions – to make it somehow different than it was. I have enough self-improvement under my belt to know that I didn’t need to do a damn thing – I needed to NOT do.
I stared down that damn hustle and do you know what I found? I true and deep still point. Peace. And then, I slept. Which I think means the hustle did not win.
The hustle is in our nervous systems. It’s the frantic feeling that keeps scanning for the next task to complete, that makes it hard to pause long enough to even read an entire blog or article (you made it this far!), or to really listen to your children, or to rest into your lover’s arms. It’s that “I’ve got to get up and keep doing” feeling, even though no matter how much you do, that feeling never goes away.
The system that asked us to take on our own personal hustle in order to keep the great machine of consumerism, individualism, and the patriarchy alive is taking a breather right now.
Can you take a breather too?
This is your invitation to take your own deep, resetting, conscious breather. To take a bath. To paint. To pick up a pen not having a plan for what will come out.
It is your opportunity, regardless of your gender or body, to find rest in the feminine, to ask yourself why you move perpetually forward, and to allow the healthy masculine within you to take action with clarity and precision. The healthy masculine does not hustle. It has no reason to. Hustle comes from a lack of self-worth and results in sloppy action. The healthy masculine executes pointed focused action.
I hand-wrote this piece in the quiet space while feeling deeply nourished. I wrote it, for the most part, unattached to the outcome. I feel a deep shift happening in me, and I already worked from home, had flexibility before this all started, and have been consciously unwinding the hustle for years – and it’s still impactful and significant. It’s similar to the benefits of going on a Vipassana retreat, only this is real life. This pause allows for true and genuine resets – in our nervous systems, in our hearts, in our relationship to rest & action.
Let the hustle die. I am. And in its place, I’m finding clarity and confidence. I’m finding love and peace, prioritization, and alignment. A deeper balance of the feminine and masculine within me. And, clarity in my business, my energy, and my efforts. We can’t get that clarity without a pause.
What are you finding? What is changing for you? What feels like a deep reset? I’d love to hear.
Check out my TED talk.
—
*******************************
***
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project and want to join our calls on a regular basis, please join us as a Premium Member, today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
Talk to you soon.
*************************
—
Photo courtesy iStock.