It doesn’t matter what day it is. What matters is the time you are awake enough to call the day yours.
I am an early-riser…these days. I didn’t used to be an early riser. Now it seems I have no choice. I am no longer the nightwalker with fangs. I mean, I still have fangs, but I don’t walk around so much at night anymore.
I used to joke with my wife whenever I went out to ijay (DJing with iPods) at Club Pure in Soemoncho that I would come back “early.” Eventually she knew to serve up the punchline, “…in the morning?” It remained a joke we could both laugh at so long as I returned home with more money than I left.
It stopped being a joke after three years, so I quit playing music for money and just enjoy a good night out. I was someone who loved Minami for all the flashy sameness it delivered when walking North from the Dotonbori bridge into the nightclub district.
We would barhop and walk the streets like we owned them, or ride our mamachari bicycles like we were couriers delivering important papers to any establishment that would exchange them for alcohol and snacks. We’d pass tuxedo-suited African doormen holding the door open for Filipina hostesses wishing their Japanese guests a safe trip home in the taxi that magically pulls up silently on well-oiled springs, and hybrid engine. The nampa lost boys with their highly-styled hair and hungry thin frames try to hook solitary young women, or pairs of them, back to their salon for a little love, attention, and champagne magnums that come out at 10000円 a pop.
Time would stops and start depending on what you were doing. I loved how 10pm to midnight meant most of the people I hung out with were finishing their teaching shifts and keen to meet up. This time to wait or meet at rendez-vous point was the slowest. Midnight to 3 a.m. was the peak of fun and passed the fastest. Then 3am to 10am just became a wash of drinks and house music. Around this time the people you met on the streets and clubs, would fade into sunlight like a reverse polaroid going back into a camera with the screeching sound of a cicada’s cry.
With a family at home, and work in front of dozens of students, or online using new technology I’m not that thrilled to use, I realized my nights out were done. It was time to find my new schedule. And embrace it.
The ant and the cricket
Aesop had a fable about an ant and a cricket. The cricket partied all summer, while the ant worked at storing away food for the winter. When winter came, the cricket died but the ant ate all the food it had saved.
While I worked at teaching in the hybrid classroom, my friend Nate was in the States visiting family. He only intended to be there for three months. Then suddenly it was two years later and he was finally able to get back to Japan.
We had kept in touch while he was moving around the states. I was flattered to think that I was a life-line. Apparently, I was the ant. It was September when he arrived. Six months later, and we finally had that perfect window to meet.
The Cricket Returns
Yesterday, I visited Nate. He had been stuck in the States while the pandemic raged. He told me what it felt like to be in the STates while the End of Days were upon us. Days in Florida just fell upon each other with no difference in weather or worry. Nights were warm, days were balmy. Clothing remained the same throughout the day.
He had a flight booked to return home in three months, but by the time arrived, the conditions for travel weren’t ideal. He’d switch on the tv and see that another ban on travel was up and that flights were being grounded, there was no cause for alarm said the news. Also in other news Trump was telling us to drink bleach, and that sunlight would kill the virus. But no cause for alarm. People please. Go back inside. Meanwhilethe alarms insider were going off left and right. From our phones, and computer screens. Riots and protests in the name of so many Black Americans were increasing, particularly around George Floyd. Fires were raging in California. A trip back to Japan amidst this chaos was not possible. Japan had closed all incoming flights to anyone but a Japanese national. And when the time came to hop on a flight, he was in Pensacola Florida and the plane he needed to be on was leaving from Chicago.
He had friends to help out, friends to stay with, and also lots of parties. It was too easy. No one had an answer or a solution. Let’s just blast the music while one side of the world burns while the other masks up.
He came to help a friend but needed to make a couple bills while he was in Florida so he ended up serving poke in a retired and affluent part of Pensacola. Then we was staying with his sister out in Texas, then in Ohio cleaning out his brother in law’s hunting cabin.
I told him it sounded like the place little kids go to die. The kind of kid that asks, “Will I see granma up in heaven?” and you have to break the news as though you were letting them know Santa doesn’t exist. “Oh, no. Grandma will be in a different place. You can see her if you get to be as old as her. But if you die as a child, you get to go to an unfinished basement in Ohio.” Now here’s your gray hoodie. Put it on and wait here. Saint Peter will bring around the White Van to take you to your destination.
That’s the kind of squalor and hopelessness he found there while the snow fell.
Eventuallly he had a chance to return to Japan and took it. He returned to make soap in Japan. “I get it,” he says exhausted of the defense he makes every time he talks about his passion. “People think it’s fucking nothing to make soap.” But you have to wait for it and work with it. And other people want your attention because they don’t see how busy you are. He wants to get back to it, but the world interrupted so much of his day to day way of getting by. How can people leave him alone so he can do what is necessary for him to make a living?
OFFICE HOURS
Having time in your day that is blocked off for your self-care, training, meditation, discovery and creativity is important. When I began working part-time, I started at different times. Every morning I woke up to a different school to be at, different start times for my commute. I wanted to avoid missing the trains that took an hour to commute to work. It required an alert brain to tell where and when to catch my train. So I began to wake up at 6am. A time with an hour of buffer to wake up, have morning coffee and clear headed enough to know when I have to head out that front door.
A steady enough wake up time led to me having a regular enough sleep time which then gave me enough sleep “perchance to dream” and Dream I did. So much so that this story line and that worry were being addressed while the coffee brewed. the more I wrote about worries, dreams, and plans of how to handle the day ahead, the more enthused I was about putting a plan into action.
Make it your MAIN HUSTLE, Not your SIDE HUSTLE.
Austin Kleon is a successful author of three books on the NYT bestseller list. Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work, and Keep Going. In an interview on theFutur Podcast he bristled when the host, Chris Do, asked him how long writing had been his side-hustle. He insisted that there was a difference between hustle and side-hustle. A hustle is the main thing you do, the thing you are passionate about. The thing that if money didn’t exist and only joy felt, you would do until you were tired enough to go to sleep without need for warm milk. THAT is your hustle. Your side hustle you do to make a little extra on the side. The thing you do after you are exhausted from coming home from your long late shift. To call your Passion a side hustle is to not respect it and yourself enough to make it the first thing you do every day.
Wake up early. Do something for you. Commit a bit of time before anything else for you. Then go to school, or the office, or the lumber yard. You’ll feel you’ve given the best of your day to the DEEP WORK you need to do on you, and now the rest of the day can be spent in service of others. You can make time for them knowing you have already taken care of your commitment to yourself.