Manual for Digging (when everyone asks you to climb)

Larisa - LoQueArde
Oct 25
5 min read

Pop-art illustration of a smiling mole wearing a miner’s helmet with a headlamp, emerging from a multicolored mound; background with fuchsia and yellow radiant rays, turquoise frame.

I don’t know when I convinced myself that understanding was the only way to move forward.

To really understand—absolutely everything: not a tutorial, not a beginner’s intro, but the entire map.

I caught myself chasing papers, mini-courses, gurus, diagrams, and also the other stuff:

astrology, synchronicities, biodescodificación, psicoanálisis by ear because it fascinates me.

“Official” science as a cathedral with outrageously expensive stained glass, and me there in dirty sneakers, knowing that sometimes the most “official” thing is the fakest thing that exists;

that the “pseudo” label is insurance against thinking, a way not to look where life leaks through even if it doesn’t grant prestige.

Don’t make me choose: I study everything and then my body decides what serves. And when I say “body,” I mean it literally: if it doesn’t throb, it doesn’t go.

There are days when I find engineering in psychology (circuits, loads, resistances), architecture in dance (columns, tensions, harmony), and religion in my blog—my secular altar, my refuge, the place where I leave candles no one sees and yet they light.

And yes, business is there too: not in the climb-the-ladder idea of success, but as a kind of organism that breathes in step with me. I loathe that word that puts you above or below as if there were a duty to rise: I prefer to think that what I do drifts, widens, swells and deflates according to the internal season. Not everything has to climb. Sometimes you have to dig.

I’m talking about emergents. Not what you plan, not a random miracle, but what sprouts because the soil was being worked while you swore you were doing nothing.

Like in agriculture: you water, pull weeds, get frustrated, get tired, cry over the dirt, and one day it comes up.

In business, in crypto, in art, in whatever: the obsession with knowing everything, swallowing the technical as if knowledge were an exorcism, can leave you breathless. And once you’re out of air, no algorithm will save you. You can fool the algorithm for a week; your body, no.

That’s the trap: we confuse “knowing” with “breathing.” And sometimes breathing means closing the laptop, sleeping, letting the edge work on its own.

Edge. I’m not going to dress it up in rare words because that would be worshipping technicism.

Call it a hollow, a gray zone, the silence between two heartbeats—that part of you that doesn’t answer to method and yet organizes.

Every time I panic about “clear steps” to tidy my project, the hollow shows up and wrecks the plan (thank you!). It annoys me and then makes me laugh.

Because what comes from that edge is more mine than any editorial calendar. And yes, it’s hard to explain without sounding lazy. But it isn’t laziness; it’s another kind of engineering.

So, marketing: I’m not asking you “what’s your purpose” like a password for some club. I’m asking what’s pushing you right now to tell what you’re telling. The other’s gaze? Yours? The algorithm’s? Do you negotiate with it or does it negotiate with you? How long is it in your favor to play that game before your pulse fades? Do you know when that strategy serves you and when it only drains you? I’m not asking so you close anything; I’m asking to crack a slit where the real kitchen shows, the place where what can’t be planned actually happens.

I was one of those who need to understand everything.

Rigidity moved me, perfection, maps that promise shortcuts (never shortcuts—premium mazes). And at the same time, that very need stalled me.

It was like dancing while measuring the step with a protractor. Until I got fed up. Until I broke just enough to lower my guard and let two days of silence do what a month of courses didn’t.

It’s not zen spirit: it’s practice. Power down, walk, organize a drawer, cry with anger, come back. And then a text appears that recognizes me better than I recognize myself. Or a service line I couldn’t have assembled if I had forced myself to be “up to” anything.

Which direction do I take, and based on what?

Sometimes based on a voice I have to peel off because it isn’t mine.

Sometimes based on an old song that brings back the urge to play.

Sometimes based on an algorithm that lies to me and I let it lie because it suits me for a while.

Sometimes based on the look of someone I want to impress (and I say it without guilt).

And when the fever to impress passes, I return to the edge:

what desire sits behind that desire? Who’s speaking when I speak about the project?

Am I honoring the path or still calling “failure” everything that hurt even though it made me better?

I don’t know if it helps to say it, but I’ll say it: your business moves like you move.

Not like you pose for the photo, not like you say you’re going to move, but how you actually move when no one’s looking.

If you’re the type to gulp down courses to smother fear, your business will resemble those courses: correct, neat, deaf.

If you’re the type who falls, rests, and returns with something crooked but alive, your business will have human edges, beautiful faults, lines that don’t fit the grid of “what’s correct” and yet work.

Not because the universe rewards authenticity, but because the body can’t lie for very long.

I’m not saying don’t study. I study everything.

I read papers and memes with the same devotion. I’m only saying: don’t asphyxiate what’s being born by trying to understand it before it exists. And when it exists, ask yourself if you’re telling it with borrowed words.

Change a word and you change an entire direction.

If you say “scale,” you’ll want bigness;

if you say “cave,” you’ll want depth;

if you say “workshop,” you’ll want dirty hands and scattered parts;

if you say “temple,” you’ll ask for silence.

Try changing the word and watch how the body of the project moves.

Some days I’m tempted to play the algorithm’s full game: thumbnails, hooks, manual storytelling.

And others I wonder if the algorithm is playing me—if it’s the one setting the music and I’m dancing with the dignity of someone still having a good time, but who knows that floor isn’t home.

Does it suit me? Sometimes yes. Sometimes no.

The key—for me—is recognizing the edge: when the game starts eating the voice, when “for everyone” starts erasing my name, my slang, my favorite mistakes.

I don’t want to end with “so the conclusion is…”. There isn’t one.

The opening question keeps pulsing, badly phrased on purpose: with what words are you telling your business, your project, your life?

Who taught you those words?

What part of you needs to change them so the emergent can appear without asking permission?

Can you stand a couple of days without “growing” to see if something else sprouts?

For my part I’ll keep mixing sciences and “pseudos,” blog and rite, dance and architecture, marketing and tenderness.

And when I start running out of air, I won’t buy another course: I’ll let the hollow do its dirty work.

Afterwards, if it clicks, I’ll tell you what came out. Or not. Because sometimes the best thing I can do for my project is shut up until the sentence arrives on its own, smelling fresh like something that doesn’t understand everything yet—and that’s exactly why it breathes.