The old man in Calcutta

When harder work is better work — regardless of how hard it might actually feel.

We’ve all heard “work smarter not harder.” But a story Rick Rubin tells in The Creative Act gives good reason to rethink that.

He describes an old man in Calcutta who goes to a well every day and draws his water with a clay pot that he lowers and raises by hand. This requires much time, effort, and concentration, as he guides the pot on its journey without striking the sides of the well and causing it to crack or break.

A passerby one day suggests that the old man allow him to build a pulley system that would accomplish the same task with much less time and effort. “The pot will be just as full with much less work,” the passerby says.

The old man replies, “I think I’m going to keep doing it the way I always have. I really have to think about each movement and there’s a great deal of care that goes into doing it right. I’d imagine if I were to use the pulley, it would become easy, and I might even start thinking about something else while doing it. If I put so little care and time into it, what might the water taste like? It couldn’t possibly taste as good.”

You know how people talk about a delicious meal they’ve prepared being “made with love”? This is that same concept.

As Rubin says, “our thoughts, feelings, processes, and unconscious beliefs have an energy that is hidden in the work … If the work doesn’t represent who you are and what you’re living, how can it hold an energetic charge?”

Who you are inevitably ends up in the work you do. This is part of the reason why, although fiction writing was my first love and I have written millions of words of it over the course of my 36 years, I have been so hesitant to publish any of it. I only now feel like the kind of person I want to feel like to publish any of the fiction I have written.

Something else holds me back in other work, and always has, daily battles in a lifelong war, though one I am learning how to win with more consistency every passing day: fear.

My greatest strength and weakness has always been my imagination. It has time and again saved me from dark moments in life, dating back to my childhood and now again, repeatedly, as an adult. It takes me to wonderful places and on grand adventures with remarkable characters. I am working on getting much of this on page and, eventually, published, to share with you.

But the thing about that imagination is that it has also frequently worked against me, dreaming up nightmares about worst-case scenarios and all the ways they may come about.

I’ve learned to stop allowing such thoughts to consume me, but they still happen sometimes. I’m learning to lean into it and use it the way planes use wind.

Did you know that airplanes take off best against the wind?

Did you know that bison are the only animal that, when confronted with a snowstorm, instinctively turns into the storm, to walk through it, somehow knowing that’s the quickest way through?

One of my biggest weaknesses when they happen is holding myself back from taking a chance on something — a story I want to write, a person I want to meet, a trip I think I should take — because I can’t know what the outcome will be.

But of course, none of us do, not really. And it’s worth taking those chances, all of them, always, because as easy as it is to imagine things going terribly, the truth is that it’s also just as likely that the outcome will be even better than we imagine.

I am living this right now. I’ve been struggling with some things. I’ll leave it at that for now. I’m having to learn to move forward with struggles that have surprised me and made my life much harder than I expected it to be at the moment and even broken my heart.

Such is life, however. To my great appreciation, life has also brought me excellent friends and therapists and books and many other resources. It occurs to me, as I write this, that while I am struggling with things that feel profoundly larger and more difficult than I ever have before, I also have good things now that I have never had before, too.

That’s beautiful.

Besides, there are benefits to be found in such struggle itself.

The creative juice it gives you is fantastic. I’ve been focused entirely on my work because I’ve simply had to. There’s an intoxication that comes with such focus. There is also a lot of beauty and benefit to struggle. Such struggle crystallizes exactly who people are in your life. It shows you what you care about the most. And it shows you who and what you are better off without, no matter how painful the releasing of them might be.

The trick, the hardest part of such struggle, is releasing the need to know the outcome of any given work I do. All I can do is do the work and give all of me to it, and trust that I’m doing the work the right way and for the right reasons. I do what I do because I believe in the beauty and power of good, human stories well told, and the beauty and power of art, and the beauty and power of living an honest life.

As Rubin writes, “The total output of human creativity, in all its kaleidoscopic breadth, pieces together the fabric forming our culture. The underlying intention of our work is the aspect allowing it to fit neatly into this fabric. Rarely if ever do we know the grand intention, yet if we surrender to the creative impulse, our singular piece of the puzzle takes its proper shape. Intention is all there is. The work is just a reminder.”

As Rubin writes later in The Creative Act, if we’re doing things right, we’re constantly evolving, as people and as artists.

The interesting part of personal evolution is that it doesn’t always make your life easier and more comfortable.

In fact, it can often put us through seasons during which life gets much, much harder and much, much less comfortable. Perhaps financially, perhaps romantically, perhaps with friendships, perhaps all of the above and then some.

This, I am learning, is OK. A natural part of life. A rite of passage, even.

The mistake I’ve made before — an easy mistake to make but a mistake nonetheless — is believing that if I feel upset, then something must be wrong. The truth is, we can feel upset about a situation, and frustrated, and hurt — but also feel peace in our soul. That’s the thing to focus on, the sensation to pursue. That peace, above all. Because regardless of what sort of difficulty might face us from other areas of life, if our soul says it is at peace, then everything else is just part of our growth. It can be difficult to trust that, but if the alternative is to stop growing, then that effectively means we choose to start dying.

No thank you. As Rubin writes:

“There is a … type of competitiveness that might be seen as an infinite gain: a story that can continue to unfold over the course of an artist’s life. This is the competition with the self. This of self-competition as a quest for evolution. The object is not to beat our other work. It’s to move things forward and create a sense of progression. Growth over superiority. Our ability and taste may evolve, yielding different works over time, but none can be evaluated as more or less than another. They are different snapshots of who we are, and who we were. They are all our best work in the moment they were created. With each new project, we are challenging ourselves to most beautifully reflect what’s living in us at that particular window of time. In this spirit of self-competition, task yourself to go further and push beyond into the unexpected. Don’t stop even at greatness. Venture beyond.”

Go forth and struggle and look forward to the day you look back on the struggle and smile at how you found your way through it.