A Forced Exile From Instagram Prompts Some Life Reflection
A newsletter where we discuss SNL, joyous collaboration, Yale cellists and a tear-inducing music video
Greetings friends! Since we last spoke, I caught COVID again. While I was recovering, my Instagram account was stolen and I lost all access to the account. Instagram has a system where you upload a video selfie and it compares it to pictures of yourself on your account, but after almost ten unsuccessful attempts, and multiple reporting of the account, I’ve had no luck.
(If you follow me on Instagram at shaguftareads, I recommend unfollowing and blocking the account as soon as possible).
In the month since this has taken place, I’ve missed sharing books (I have resorted to texting my husband pictures of excerpts that I MUST share) and chatting and learning from others. I’ve also found it surprisingly lovely being out of the loop. I don’t know what new books are coming out, I don’t know what cool new spots I am missing out on because of my COVID tiredness, and unless friends/acquaintances explicitly get in touch and tell me news or share on Facebook or Twitter, I do not know what is going on beyond my family. It also means I am overflowing with stories and things I want to tell you, and as a result, this newsletter is longer than it has been in the past. If you’ve enjoyed my musings in the past and haven’t subscribed yet, now is definitely the time to subscribe to this newsletter and send it to a friend.
In the space that not having Instagram has opened up, I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on joy, personal leadership, trust, collaboration and stability.
Art often sparks such reflections for me. This past weekend I went to an incredible concert at the VanDusen gardens in Vancouver of a Yale cello group called “Low Strung”. The music was exceptionally beautiful, but what I found most moving was the visible joy with which the cellists played individually, the clear trust they had between them and the delight they had playing together. Over the course of two hours, they cheered, encouraged and celebrated one another. Everyone had opportunities to be both a soloist, and to support songs as part of the group. They all wrote the arrangements. Despite the huge crowd and sold out show, they seemed centered, joyous, relaxed and alert.
Their collaboration produced excellence and seeing their energy prompted me to reflect on how I want to bring a spirit of abundance, joy and relaxed power to my own life work.
Similarly, at the end of April I attended an event about award-winning (including Best Music Video of SXSW 2022 ) music video“Meet Me at the Light” with director Alexander Farah, producers Kashif Pasta and Shyam Valera of Dunya and cinematographer Farhad Ghaderi. It’s a music video that never fails to make me cry, but I crashed the filmmaker event because I love hearing from creators about their process and I learn something new every time I hear a conversation about this specific project.
During the panel, each person celebrated their fellow collaborators, exuded visible calmness and joy, and radiated deep commitment to excellence collectively and to their own craft. It was clear that with different people in any one of those roles, an entirely different project would have been the result. Despite the packed room, the power of the team was evident, and in particular, the relaxed, centered, and alert energy and intelligence of director Alexander Farah shone through. In the weeks since that event I’ve reflected repeatedly about the trust, joy, vision and collaboration I witnessed that evening and how trust, care and surrender engenders tremendous beauty.
Joy may seem like a strange word to hold onto, but whatever your field or life circumstance, I think searching for sources of joy matters. In May, I read “The Year of the Horses” a book in which the author begins by sharing that she is 37, she has a healthy three year old child, a mortgage, and a “fine enough marriage” but she is depressed, and not showing up as the person and the parent that she wants to be. The book is about her journey to return back to herself by starting to ride again after thirty years away from horses, and later, by finding herself in the unlikely world of polo.
This isn’t a book where the author dramatically changes into a whole new person - it isn’t an “Eat, Pray, Love” story, and I think that is why I loved it. It takes a while for the horses to appear in the book. For a lot of the book, the author isn’t a very talented rider. There are a few times where she admits it doesn’t make sense to participate in polo or try to find a barn to ride in. There are times when she stops. It’s a winding, meandering sort of book, but at the heart of it is a search for sources of joy that matter purely because they bring the author delight.
Most notably, the author stops riding when she realises she is pregnant again. That pregnancy results in a miscarriage and afterwards, the author returns back to riding because she realises she cannot “go on withholding joy” from her own life and needs to learn to “love better and love herself” in order to honour the life that did not come to be. In another passage she shares that “the realisation that she must return to horses - “regardless of the time commitment, impracticality, or cost” came from the way the medical system treated the miscarriage and her body with little regard for her own personhood.
Both of these reflections resonated and took me by surprise, because I’ve never read about joy in a book about miscarriages. Such books have somber titles that mention broken hearts, or empty cradles (words from actual book titles) rather than self-development, self realisation and stubborn resilience. The Year of the Horses was the first book that described loss in a frame that made sense to me, and I recommend the read because two years into a global pandemic, we are all finding our way through grief.
Acknowledging joy also requires acknowledging that instability can feel decidedly joy-less depending on the ramifications of instability for you. In other words, stability matters too. In the Year of Horses for instance, author Courtney Maum shares her own financial anxiety and the need for their family to have more financial stability in their lives alongside the development of their artistic work.
I was reminded about that candid discussion of stability when I heard this week’s episode of the podcast Pop Chat, where hosts Elamin AbdelMahmoud, Kevin Fallon and Amil Niazi discuss the departure of four long-standing cast members from SNL. They ask: What does such a departure mean? How does one pivot from SNL to other work? Why do some people stay season after season on the show? Should everyone leave after a certain length of time?
And their conclusion is that there are no universally right answers. Some people want to do other projects, particularly in an era where the show has more room for cast members to develop their own identity while contributing to the development of the show, and other people want to be on SNL for many years to the exclusion of other things. Being within SNL means having a steady paycheque, freedom from the endless cycle of auditions and having an influential and important space to grow and learn in. The hosts stress that this is not a bad choice; it is a rational and well reasoned one.
What I took from that conversation was that although there are no singular answers, reflecting on your journey, knowing one’s purpose and why you do what you do is key. Life is too short and finite to not consider what it is you want and how you are working towards that in the life you currently have. That doesn’t necessarily mean productivity: it could be health, joy, stability, collaboration, or whatever else that matters to you, but that self knowledge is important.
To Read
A) Birds of Uganda by Hafsa Zayyan: I bought this book in Cape Town based on a friend’s recommendation, and it has turned out to be one of my favourite reads thus far of 2022. The book follows two characters: Sameer, a lawyer on track to become a partner in his London firm who has just been selected to start a new branch location in Singapore, and another male character in Uganda, writing to his first wife. We learn about this second character through his letters that take place over decades. They are connected in some way, but at the start of the novel, the connection between these characters isn’t clear. Later, Sameer travels to Uganda and we learn more about himself and his history. This book is about faith, both in the frame of corporate London where navigating Islamophobia is a part of Sameer’s reality, and Uganda, where there is more space for him to navigate his own relationship to faith. The book is also about migration, East African identity, about race, family, and so much more and I found it a fascinating and absorbing read. I don’t like ratings on scales, but this was a 4.75 read for me.
B) Book Lovers by Emily Henry: I loved Emily Henry’s earlier rom-com “Beach Read”, did not enjoy “People we Meet on Vacation” and loved this latest book “Book Lovers.” This book is a rom-com about an book editor and an agent and asks about the story of the character in rom-coms we often forget about. You know. The rom-com character who is a Type A driven personality (think Patricia from “You’ve Got Mail", or many many Netflix films where someone is buying the local town inn/castle/neighbourhood and falls in love with the person opposing them by the end) who is not the heroine of the story, but invariably the person that the lead character walks away from for someone more relaxed and down to earth. This book looks at the story of the abandoned person and wonders about their motivations and their story.
To Watch
A) Panga: It’s been a while since I’ve seen a Bollywood film, and I loved Panga. The story follows Jaya Nigam, a mother and ex national athlete who was famous for her skills as a kabaddi athlete. She left her career ten years previous when she became a mother and her son needed special care. At the “old old age” of 32, Jaya starts to train again, at first as an exercise mostly for her son because he wants her to try to join the national team again and then for herself as she excavates the person she is underneath her roles and responsibilities.
Julia on Crave: Though I don’t know much about French cooking, have never attempted a Julia Child recipe, I found this show utterly delightful. I was struck by is how Julia Child navigates her social system and her family system. Instead of declaring to her husband she wants to start a cooking show, she invites him in as a partner and arranges things so that it seems like it is all his idea. When she confronts resistance at her television station, she validates and flatters others while still plowing through with what she needs to get done. Her approach to systems change is not to battle, but to charm, and while it is aggravating to watch, it is also masterful. (Later on in the season she meets Betty Friedman who questions her approach, but that is another story.) More than liking Julia though, I was struck and captivated by the character of Alice, Julia’s young, female Black producer who faces racism and sexism in television, and navigates both to do the kind of work she wants to do in the world. For Alice alone, this show is worth watching.