A Series of Perfect Days
A 30% newsletter sale, systemic mediation and the beauty of Alexander Chee
I attended a brilliant webinar this week about systemic mediation hosted by the Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement and featuring Louise Adongo and Jean-Noé Landry from the Transition Bridges project. During the webinar, Louise Adongo described 2024 as a time of “polycrisis and polyreckonings”, emphasizing that “we cannot work on things in silos”. When I heard that, a little shiver of recognition went up my spine. We are in a time of accelerating, unbearably compounding, interrelated crises, and I am yearning for language and approaches that acknowledge and address that heartbreak.
In the webinar, systemic mediation was defined as the following:
"the practice of acting as an intermediary between different actors, scales or systems to facilitate dialogue, reach mutual understanding and resolve conflicts. It supports interventions carried out at various levels- individual, organizational, systemic and cultural/metaphysical- where mediators can help identify common interests, encourage collaboration and negotiate agreements that can contribute to the development of resilient and regenerative communities. They play a crucial role in promoting collaboration within complex socio-ecological systems.”
From that definition, they shared powerful stories about systemic mediation. Jean-Noé Landry spoke about the importance of “intersectoral knowledge, action and justice” and how an “intersectoral collaboration deficit” can keep us stuck in our respective silos.
I love this idea of an intersectoral collaboration deficit. Collaboration requires trust, and trust requires practice. Somatic scholar Staci Haines describes the way we respond under pressure as our conditioned tendencies and explains that these conditioned tendencies are adaptations we make to meet our needs for safety, belonging and dignity. These responses are automatic and embodied ways we meet these needs. As a result, they can often seem like “just the way we are” because we cannot remember another way of being.
Conditioned tendencies can broadly be described as “moving toward”, “moving away” and “moving against” and describe the way we respond when we are under pressure. They can have unintended costs and/or consequences because our thinking/beliefs, relational stances, actions and non actions and emotional range are shaped by these tendencies. The way to change one’s shape/conditioned tendencies is direct practice. Trust for example is a lifelong practice for me, and I have to practice collaboration, and managing my activation when I am in an unknown environment.
Inner work seems critical to participate in systemic mediation. Louise Adongo spoke about systemic mediation as a pathway to "change the things that you cannot accept'‘ and offered this powerful question: what is the process by which systems can change? Understanding how systems can change is particularly urgent she explained, when you have multiple identities that are impacted by unchanging systems.
A systems lens still requires understanding the people in the system. Adongo noted that we often hear the phrase “we are soft on people but hard on systems”, but explained that this phrasing doesn’t make sense, because “it is people acting in systems that make systems hard.” Systems are not abstract entities, they are made up of people and therefore, we must look at people too. In terms of climate change for example, we must consider the multiple intersecting identities that are impacted most by climate change and reflect on who is tasked with designing solutions to these crises. This conversation offered that there are “many different contexts that would benefit from mediation” but often the change we are looking for feels stuck. Systemic mediation offers a way to collaborate, identify commonalities and move forward together to transform systems. Louise reminded us that it is not possible to “prototype your way out of generational harm” and rather than “transitions, we are interested in transformation.”
So much of what I heard resonated deeply with me. All mistakes in notetaking and sharing of the learnings of this rich webinar are my own, but you can learn more about this concept from their wonderful repository of writing here at the
.I came out of that session energized and grateful I attended because every morsel of hope offered to cope with my feelings of despair these days is much appreciated. This week I also read the Anti-assholism memo from the Decolonial Futures Collective, a memo that offers a list of orientations to move towards and away from as we work to break our addiction to modernity/coloniality and move to “collective sobriety.” The list is a reminder to do your own work and not assume innocence in systems you are complicit in and it felt like I came across it at the right time. Ramadan is less than two weeks away, and in the lead up to the month, I’ve been thinking increasingly about the inner work required for outer transformation, the practices that support that inner work, and where my own specific learning edges lie.
Part of the necessary inner work for social change is learning to be present without judgement to the reality of what is. A few days ago I went to see a nearly flawless film called “Perfect Days” about the routine of a man in Tokyo who works as a cleaner of public toilets. I don’t want to romanticize what is a difficult, thankless, poorly compensated job, but the film was gorgeous, and I appreciated the ways it invited viewers to consider the beauty of routine. The protagonist of the film is a man in his late fifties named Hirayama who is quiet, rarely speaks, and follows the same routine each day. Even when he is not speaking, he is noticing and observing, smiling as he notices the way the light catches in trees. For me, the film sparked reflections on the following six things:
[Warning: this is not a film with spoilers, but I do mention specific details from the film here, so if you’d rather not hearing anything before watching it, skip past this section!]
Takeaways from Perfect Days:
Routine: The majority of the film follows the protagonist on his daily activities. He leaves his house early in the morning while listening to English songs on cassette, lunches in the same park and takes photos of the same tree. After work he cycles to the bathhouse, has dinner at the same local cafe and reads before bed. On his day off if he has finished his book he buys another one for $1. In an age when novelty is sought in restaurants, experiences, and the pattern of our days, there is something beautiful about doing the same thing day after day, wearing a set wardrobe, and going to the same places. There is a palpable feeling of liberation that emerges from his routine.
Movement: There is so much movement in the main character’s life. He sleeps on the floor, cycles everywhere, has a physical job, travels to bathe, and on the weekend, gets up early, cleans his apartment and goes to the laundromat. He does not snack, and he is fit and healthy in a way that does not involve gyms, but simply the movement of his everyday life. As he cycles he observes and delights in the world itself.
Beginnings and endings: The first thing that Hirayama does each morning is see the green through his window. He reaches for his book first instead of his phone, and then gets out of bed quickly and gets on with his day. At the end of the day when it is too late to see his book properly and he has done all his tasks, he goes to bed. He wakes up with an internal clock. I confess, I start my day with my alarms and my phone and this film showed me the beauty of another way of being.
Home typologies: This movie is a reminder that the majority of the world does not live in single-family detached homes. Yes Hirayama lives in a home with few features (no kitchen, no separate bathroom) but even at different income levels, in dense cities the majority of the world lives in smaller spaces. The post World War Two dream sold in North America of individual homes for nuclear families is a departure from historical and global housing typologies. In this movie, we are shown how in smaller spaces, many functions are externalized to exist outside the home. Food is eaten in the local cafe, bathing is done in the bathing house, and as a result, the main character has loose community ties in his neighbourhood and the places he frequents (the bookstore, the film developing studio, the laundromat) through a regular routine. Despite living alone, because of these activities, the protagonist of this film does see other people.
The beauty of the present: One of the central themes of the film is the importance of now, with a line from the trailer translating to “now is now, next time is next time.” Hirayama’s absorption into “now” is evident throughout the film. When Hirayama takes a pause in his work because someone needs to use the washroom he is cleaning for example, he does not turn to his phone. Instead, he notices what is going on around him, delights in the flutter of trees the texture of light itself, and notices the expressions of the people around him. Although Hirayama' doesn’t say much, it is clear that he is able to generate his own happiness and feeling of safety. He is at home within himself and he able to be present with himself.
Excellence in work: Despite no one checking the quality of his work (his work partner for example cleans toilets absentmindedly while looking at his phone) Hirayama is fastidious in his work. He uses a small hand mirror to check if there is any dirt in the places that he cannot see. He folds toilet paper in little triangles. He makes his own tools. He does his work with excellence simply because he wants to and watching him, that labour feels powerful.
Alexander Chee’s book “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel” is an extraordinary example of excellence in the face of what seems like legitimate grounds of despair. His memoir is about focusing on the now and practising hope because the future is unknown. The essays in this collection focus on Chee’s experiences of being a gay Korean-American writer in New York and his commitment to create and live truth (the dedication in this book is to his mother and father who taught him to fight). It is a hopeful and wonderful collection that helped soften the deadening in my heart that has formed over the past five months and made it difficult to create and share.
This book helped me return to my writing because Chee writes that times when the world is collapsing is about creating art more than ever:
“The point of it is in the possibility of being read by someone who could read it. Who could be changed, out past your imagination’s limits. Hannah Arendt has a definition of freedom as being the freedom to imagine that which you cannot yet imagine. The freedom to imagine that as yet unimaginable work in front of others, moving them to still more action you can’t imagine, that is the point of writing, to me. You may think it is humility to imagine your work doesn’t matter. It isn’t. Much the way you don’t know what a writer will go on to write, you don’t know what a reader, having read you, will do.”1
Only in America do we ask our writers to believe they don’t matter as a condition of writing. It is time to end this. Much of my time as a student was spent doubting the importance of my work, doubting the power it had to reach anyone or to do anything of significance.2
Chee argues that it is vital to move past one’s personal doubt because it is a gift to have time to advance in the direction of your heart longings. In the book for example, he shares a story of a friend who dies shortly after his fortieth birthday, expressing but not fully embodying his commitment to write. Much earlier in the book Chee shares the story of his father’s early death.
This book and a newsletter anniversary made me think about my own writing. February 2024 marked the two year anniversary of this newsletter. When it began in February 2022, I was sick and I described “A Little Bit of Hope” in the following ways:
Over the last two years, these newsletters have explored marriage, faith, travel, equity, recurrent miscarriages, books, art, grief and health because I’ve only become more ill. After I experienced a major health change in November 2022, this newsletter became a place where I talk about chronic illness and disability and how it has shaped and is shaping my life.
As I move into this next year of the newsletter, it will continue to be a space of practising hope through art, healing, curiosity and community. To make this link clearer, the name of the newsletter has changed to simply “Practising Hope.” It is easy for your life to shrink when you are consistently ill, and I want to share how I am practising living a life of contribution, friendship and love in the specific body and life that I have.
If you’d like to upgrade your subscription, I am offering the biggest newsletter sale I’ve ever offered. The link below offers a 30% discount on new yearly subscriptions. I’ve never offered a discount of this size before, but I want to offer a more accessible entry point to the newsletter as I more tightly focus my writing here and attempt to nourish other writing projects with the soil and water and light that they need. I hope you’ll join. The sale ends on March 15th.
Till next time,
Shagufta
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Loved reading this.
Beautiful and brilliant as always, Shagufta!!! Thank you.