Labour, Imagination and Joy - The Triangle of Movement Building and Our Lives

On Arooj Aftab, bubble gum pool floats, and the psychology of money. In this newsletter edition we’re talking about joy, imagination and labour and the beauty of a slow vacation.

Incredible art moves you to create. It is the early hours of the morning and humming through me is Pakistani artist Arooj Aftab’s performance at the Chan Centre tonight, and my drug of choice, Tetley elachi tea. It was a incredible evening of “intensely sad music”, ridiculously talented musicians, and powerful vocals. It felt wild to hear Urdu on the mainstage of a theatre in which I never expected to hear it, and my heart swelled seeing all the aunties in my row who came in salwar kameezes excited about what was about to unfold. And Arooj Aftab delivered. Each piece was beautiful, and she exuded power and presence, making jokes throughout the concert. (After the opening remarks from different speakers for example, she walked on and said “okay we’ve just heard from a bunch of dudes, so I’m just going to begin).

And so she did. And it was an evening that expanded my imagination.

A few days ago on Eid, I heard Robyn Maynard and Leanne Simpson speak about their new book “Rehearsals for Living” as part of the Indian Summer Festival in Vancouver. In that talk, Robyn Maynard spoke about how we need imagination, labour and joy to ground our movement building and our lives, and I’ve been thinking about all three of these concepts since then. In this edition of “A Little Bit of Hope” I want to share what’s been captivating my imagination, bringing me joy, and helping me think through work in new ways.

Joy

June was a full month. To reset, I took four days off, four gloriously empty days that stretched into nine days because of a statutory holiday and weekends. Vacation time is precious, and it is tempting to pack a lot of “doing” into your downtime. And that works if you are the kind of person for whom doing and seeing a lot energizes and resources you, but I am starting to realize that I am simply not that person. I like slowness.

And so for this break, I gave myself permission to be unproductive. I read slowly in parks, I went to the farmers market, I cooked, I walked, I floated lazily in the pool, I had picnics in my neighbourhood, I attended book talks, I saw friends and family, but most of all, I didn’t do anything at all. I was surprised at how tired I was and all the ways my body reacted once finally allowed to stop. I had terrible headaches and spent a lot of time on my couch or watching television until my body trusted it wasn’t going to have to go anywhere. After that, my cortisol levels dropped and my shoulders unknotted.

I read this paragraph from Ross Gay’s book “The Book of Delights” while floating in the pool and it resonated.

“The Webster’s definition of loiter reads thus:”to stand or wait around idly without apparent purpose,” and “to travel indolently with frequent pauses.” Among the synonyms for this behaviour are linger, loaf, laze, lounge, lollygag, dawdle, amble, saunter, meander, putter, dillydally, and mosey. Any one of these words, in these wrong frame of mind, might be considered critique or, nouned, epithet (“Lollygagger!” or “Loafer!”). Indeed, lollygag was one of the words my mom would use to cajole us while jingling her keys when she was waiting on us, which, judging from the visceral response I had while writing that memory, must’ve been not quite infrequent. All of these words to me imply having a nice day. They imply having the best day. They also imply being unproductive. Which leads to being, even if only temporarily, nonconsumptive, and this is a crime in America, and more explicitly criminal depending upon any number of quickly apprehended visual cues.” [..]

“Which points to another of the synonyms for loitering, which I almost wrote as delight: taking one’s time. For while the previous list of  synonyms allude to time, taking one’s time makes it kind of plain, for the crime of loitering, the idea of it, is about ownership of one’s own time, which must be, sometimes, wrested from the assumed owners of it, who are not you, back to the rightful, who is.” ~~(The Book of Delight, by Ross Gay, p.230-232).

From Ross Gay, I also learnt the concept of “delight stacking”, and thereafter, as much as I could, I leaned like a sunflower towards every hint of joy. Walking to get bubble tea and with no deadline to get back, I stopped and admired the new park of wildflowers that seemed to have blossomed overnight. On the Bon Appetit YouTube channel, I came across recipe developer Zaynab Issa, and looked her up because I thought her hijab game was on-point - a decision that led to making a very delicious recipe called “Afghan Pasta”.

Imagination

Instead of stressing about all the things I wasn’t doing - (at the beginning of the week I emphatically told my physiotherapist that this is going to be a week of life admin and then quickly realised that was not going to be the case) I let go and surrendered. And with the newfound spaciousness in my day, I had time to dream and read.

One of the best things I read was “Who is Wellness For?” by Fariha Roisin. This book is a well-researched (albeit dense) book that explores wellness culture and who it leaves behind, that interweaves the author’s story with research and broader themes. This book is an exploration of how and why we need wellness, the wellness industrial complex and its failures, and how capitalism has co-opted wellness. It is a book that asks us to expand our imagination because “so much of the work of oppression is about policing the imagination” (Saidiya Hartman, quoted in “Who is Wellness For).

Two of my deepest take aways from this book:

a) We need to know the origin of the wellness practices we adopt and we cannot divorce practices from their original intended context. We cannot meditate for example, without acknowledging and centering the Divine. To do so is nonsensical (p.54). Meditation is a spiritual practice that is not intended to isolate a person from the world, but rather, is meant to equip a person to accept their impermanent presence in the world and to orient towards service. For me, this book was a reminder to turn more closely to my own Islamic traditions and seek wellness therein.

b) The Descartes idea of the mind/body split has impoverished all of us. It’s a false duality. Unmetabolized trauma, colonization, and other life experiences leave their imprint on us; our transformation will not happen in a weekend worth of work. This is generational healing work. And until we heal, trauma produces coping adaptive responses. We must heal, and we must commit to healing the things that ail us, together. The micro healing of healing oneself must be seen in context of macro healing, or healing our broader community. We all need tiny networks of care.

Labour

Fariha’s book was a reminder that capitalism harms us all, and we must dismantle and divest from systems that rely on scarcity rather than abundance. This is not really the same thing, but for months now, I’ve been saying I want to learn more about my own relationship to money to help me imagine more expansive versions of what I want from my life. Thus far, all I have done learning wise, is get in a habit of buying books related to this goal and allowing them to pile up unread.

And so over my break I began to learn. To begin, I read The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel over an afternoon while I floated in the pool. The book is comprised of 20 short lessons, and while some of it requires a reread, I enjoyed the book. The book argues that based on life experiences, the decade we were born in, our class background and other factors, we are all making financial decisions that make sense to us and are logical from our perspective. This book is about understanding how we behave, and addressing the psychological aspects of our relationship to money, rather than simply outlining “financial rules”.

Three of my favourite takeaways from the book were not about specific financial practices, but about reminders to be reflective and conscious people. For example, Housel advises:

a) taking advantage of the power of compounding. This is true in work, where the longer one stays the more expertise you can develop, the more vacation time you accrue and so forth, rather than being in constant start up mode. In relationships, it is so much work to figure out how you and your partner work together, and to begin that journey with someone new, requires tremendous energy. In one’s home, each move takes energy. In our first Vancouver apartment after moving from South Africa for example, my husband and I had a post it note on our fridge that read “Migration requires a tremendous expenditure of resources” a quote from a book called Birds, Art, life by Kyo Maclear. In money, wealth creation requires “quieting the ego that wants stuff”, and being willing to leave things alone for decades.

Housel advises to persist in things so that you can benefit from the power of compounding, but to be reflective in your commitments. If something isn’t working, he suggests not dragging it out, but rather switching as fast as possible so that you can go back to the power of compounding.

b) Questioning the dominant. Housel reminds the reader that what is projected as desirable - a house in the suburbs, a whole set of appliances just for you, a lawnmower, a garden of your own to tend, a car lifestyle, etc is very much a product of postwar America policies and spending and access to capital. We live in a different world now (he needs to go further here to acknowledge that for many people postwar America was never that for them but the book is lacking in an equity and power analysis), but his point that we need to dream different dreams resonated. For more on this point, I recommend Mia Birdsong’s incredible book “How We Show Up”. Instead of destroying the planet, taking on debt, and living beyond our means, we must divest from the postwar concept of “keeping up with the joneses.”

c) Expanding your understanding of a return on investment. While there are multiple ways to invest money if you have extra income, you don’t have to invest it in typical ways. A return on investment can look like many things. Money just in cash savings for example is valuable because it can give you the opportunity to take time off, or express values that are important to you. It does not make sense to delay joy until the end of one’s lives, it is important to be nourished throughout.

d) Recognising that your success is not a function of your efforts alone. It is a function of privilege and luck. Malcolm Gladwell has a book where he describes events that produce outliers, and Housel notes that even if you experience the same set of events as another person there are no guaranteed outcomes. In Outliers Gladwell describes how Bill Gates went to a specific high school in Seattle that gave him considerable access to a computer when most people didn’t. In his group of friends comprising himself, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, there was a third friend, who died before he graduated high school in a freak mountaineering accident. Your success is not yours alone, and your failure too, is not a consequence of your actions alone. We have a tendency however, to see our failures as “bad luck” and our success as due to our efforts rather than blessings or inter generational privileges.

There are many more lessons from the book, but in sum, this book was a good way to start a conversation with myself about the space between between mindless consumption and denying oneself always that I am curious to explore.

How are you spending your summer months? What are you reading, watching, eating? I’d love to hear from you. And as always, if you’ve enjoyed this newsletter please do share with a friend and subscribe.