Who's hustling? Why? What else is there?
Recently I found myself with only one client hour on a Saturday – a rarity for me. Of course, I still went to my office and spent too much time looking at email and all of that*, but it felt different, more relaxed. After I was done, I went home and felt relaxed enough to make Korean egg rolls (with my own modifications).
Image shows my red pot with zucchini, carrots, peppers and garlic, ready to go into egg rolls
Image shows a bowl with chop chae noodles, bean sprouts and fake meat ready to mix
Egg rolls take time, and I haven’t made them in years. As I made them, I thought about how I begged my mother to make them pretty much any time someone said, “What will we have for dinner?” Mostly my mother said, “Not today” which makes perfect sense to my adult self. Today if I am going to make them, I need a nice clear schedule, with nothing else happening afterwards. Besides eating them.
I feel similarly about writing – it takes time, and I need a fair bit of space in my day before I will even start that creative process. Which reminded me about my commitment to moving from “hustle to flow” as Shawn Ginwright suggests in The Four Pivots. What he said about hustling and how it drives many of us forward fit me and my life perfectly. And I liked his thoughts on flow, on how to find ease in our lives, how we can work with what we have rather than trying to push and try to make everything fit somehow.
But even as I was (re)dedicating myself to finding my flow, I thought about what a privilege it is to be in a place where I can think about finding flow. I left home at 17, and I have hustled hard* almost all the years since then. That hustle feels like it’s in my bones, like if I have too much down time, I get antsy.
Image shows my egg rolls in rice paper wrappers, ready for the next step, frying.
It’s not an accident or poor decisions that got me to this point, much as the world would like me to believe it. This world is full of so much push – it comes from patriarchy, productivity culture, ableism – and for many of us if we didn’t hustle, we wouldn’t make it (and I don’t mean that like, “succeed in life,” I mean that like, “survive”). I still work multiple jobs*, trying to make sure that if the bottom falls out, I will land in one piece.
Image shows a close up of a bitten egg roll, veggies all sticking out of the top. Behind the egg roll is Maite the Rottweiler, hoping for a bite.
I don’t have any easy answers for us hustlers. I don’t know how to create flow in a packed schedule. I don’t have tips or strategies. I can’t even write this piece without praising my own hustle.
How is this all related to egg rolls? Egg rolls need time to create, and because I switched to rice paper I had to seriously slow down (rice paper is NOT in a hurry). And I wouldn’t have made them (or written this little post) if I hadn’t had a little extra space. Time to enjoy my creations!
* see how even in the beginning I’m trying to prove that I’m still hustling?
* more evidence of my hustling
* yes, hustling
Image shows a stack of fried egg rolls, 8 of them. They are kind of see through because of the rice paper wrappers, so the green zucchini and the orange carrot and the yellow bean sprouts are visible. It is also the banner image.
