On the Risk of Trying Things and Experiencing Grief Again

A heatwave and the beginning of a new Islamic calendar year is making me think a lot about purpose and evaluating my time.

It’s August, and I’m writing to you from the marginally cooler other side of an extreme heat week. The air conditioning in our building has been broken for months, and over the past week, the high temperatures felt unbearable. The heat left me listless, exhausted and unable to do very much - a frustrated, irritated sliver of my normal self. I tried cafes, I tried fans, I tried the public library, but mostly I just trudged through the week, struggling more and more every day.

Desperate for some respite one evening we saw Marcel: The Shell with Shoes On, a film I confess I knew nothing about beforehand, but watched because the theatre had air-conditioning and it was playing at the right time. The movie is about Marcel, who lives in an Airbnb, and lost his entire family/community when the owners of the house had a fight that resulted in one person moving out suddenly and accidentally taking the entire community with him. Marcel and his grandmother were left behind, and when the movie begins, we meet them after they’ve been living alone in the house for a couple of years trying to make things work. The premise of the film is that someone staying in the home has noticed Marcel and wants to document his life, and the film is a stop-motion sort of mockumentary about what ensures. Within this simple plot are profoundly moving characters and a touching story that speaks deeply to grief, the beauty of the small, and the value of community.

Here are some of my favourite lines and moments from the film.

1. On the Risk of Trying Things and Experiencing Grief Again

When Marcel has an opportunity to try something new and take up an opportunity that might lead to information about the whereabouts of his family, he is worried that something might happen to his grandmother. With tears in his eyes he asks:

 “How can I risk losing everything for the possibility of something?” He is scared that his attempt to find his family will fail and will result in losing his grandmother. He is scared of grieving all over again.

This is the question we all ask ourselves whenever we try again after heartbreak, when we open our heart again after grief. After a certain point of time after loss, your pain becomes more muted; it becomes manageable and familiar, it is something you live alongside. You may not be healed, but you learn to work around your pain. To try again, whether it is for a love, a friendship, a family relationship, a job, a venture or whatever it is that is dear to you is to potentially fail and lose again. It means risking opening up all your recovered wounds and potentially ending up in a worse state than you were before. Without trying though, you cannot get to a more vibrant, rich and textured life. And so the question becomes: do I risk failure and greater pain for something that is only a maybe?

This question, of whether it is better to protect whatever you have and stay safe, or risk greater loss and potentially gain new joy is one everyone must address and answer for themselves. This film is a moving and touching exploration of one answer.

2. On Embracing New Things

When Marcel is nervous and saying no to new things, his grandmother (played by the incredible Isabella Rossellini) urges him to reconsider saying:

“Try and take the adventure. Don’t use me as a reason not to leave.” This is the mindset she wants Marcel to adopt, to choose trying over not trying, to choose exploration over safety, to be curious. By daylighting his thought process, she is able to interrogate his assumptions and ensure that he cannot hide behind the explanation of not doing things because of his love for someone else. He cannot hide behind his fear and avoid addressing it through telling himself a story of obligations. He has a life and he must live it.

3. On Community

When clips of Marcel uploaded on YouTube go viral, he goes through comments and is confused. The comments are not about helping Marcel find his family, they simply express fandom. As Marcel reads comment after comment, he remarks: “this is an audience, not a community!” The difference between a community and an audience is juxtaposed throughout the film. Audience members take pictures of themselves outside Marcel’s house, consume videos and create related content of their own without actually learning more about Marcel. In contrast, the community Marcel lost, and his current community of his grandmother, the land, the bugs in the garden and their human is a community where each member has different skill sets and characteristics, shares histories and knowledge (for example, there is a whole community connected to Marcel through his music) and is connected through care and service and knowledge of each other. It is an entirely different thing to being part of an audience.

Watching this film felt like the continuation of something I’ve been mulling over in the past few weeks. Why do we do what we do? How can purpose be a motivator and a guide to do and become more?

I watched an interview recently on q on cbc with a musician named Rhiannon Giddens about her first opera, which is about the life of an enslaved Islamic scholar.  I didn’t know her beforehand, but the topic of the opera intrigued me. At one point Tom Power and Rhiannon Giddens start speaking about folk music, and why it must be learnt and played in community and not in classrooms, and Giddens describes the struggle she has with people just learning for learning sake, asking:

“What are you learning it for? Without a cultural connection, without a cultural context, what does the music mean and why are you playing it?

Later on in the interview, Power asks Giddens: “Why develop an opera? There are many different ways (books, articles and so forth) to highlight unknown or forgotten histories. Why music and why opera?”

In response, Giddens describes herself as being the “research arm of the performing arts community” because she’ll read the books, the research being done, the contextualisation of where this music comes from, the history, she will read all these things and then will create something that becomes an “emotional shortcut” for people. She notes that “she wouldn’t be in the music industry if she didn’t have this mission for sure” because it is not something that is good for her, but explained that she can focus on her mission and if something is good for the mission she will do it. Everything she does stems from her mission, and she can do things (like wearing makeup) if they are good for her mission, even if she does not want to do them inherently in and of themselves. She has a purpose that guides what she does and her next steps.

My lesson and takeaway from that conversation is that when a goal is clear, it is easier to address or commit to things that may not be desirable to you in and of themselves because of what they are connected to.

A few days later purpose surfaced again during a workshop I attended through UBC called Decolonizing Wellness facilitated by Larissa Crawford of Future Ancestors Services.

Two of the most important take aways from the event for me were:

a) We must reshape the way we evaluate success.

b) We must rethink our relationship to time.

Rather than measuring success through criteria such as profit, donations, number of readers or any other quantitative criteria, Larissa Crawford recommended considering relational success criteria when measuring success. Instead of simply measuring the quantitative (for example how many people served), relational success criteria are defined collectively, not only from the perspectives of one group of people but rather, by taking the “relationships, needs and experiences of different groups of people and Earth” into account. They cannot be answered easily; they are more qualitative in nature.

The lecture made me think about this Substack. This newsletter gives background data/statistics on who reads this newsletter, and details on audience, but it does not capture impact. It is only when people reach out directly or leave a comment or send a message about the impact of a particular newsletter or the newsletter as a whole, that I have a better sense of why it is important to keep writing. (If you’ve sent/continue to send me one of those messages - thank you).

I often evaluate my weeks based on what I get done, but I want to shift from that one metric. I want think more deeply about how I evaluate my own success and the success of the projects I am committed to. External evaluation might look like relational success criteria, but internal evaluation would mean assessing how I show up, how I feel when I do different tasks, the state of my prayers, the quality of my meals, the state of my home, whether I am tending to my relationships, whether I am moving my body, nourishing my joy, and overall, how much space I have to take care of myself and those I am connected to. It is about how I keep my commitments to myself, and foster relationships with others.

Re time, the workshop spoke about decolonizing one’s relationship with time (I love this article by Larissa on Refinery 29 that brings up similar points) and suggested that among other signs, “a colonized and capitalist experience of time can manifest as steady urgency culture.” The opposite makes time for one’s relationship to others, to land, to the flow of the seasons. So much of work life can look like steady urgency culture and this is a area of activity I want to think more about. I know what a different relationship with time looks like in one’s own consulting practice - what can it look like within large organizational environments?

In closing, I have no final conclusions about purpose, but I am carrying these questions about meaning and purpose and commitments as I begin this new Gregorian month and the new Islamic year of 1444 A.H. What guides your own thinking about purpose and time? And what are you reading this summer? As always, please do share.

To Eat

One of my favourite recipes from Romy Gill’s vegan cookbook Zaika, I had this chana daal recipe recently and recommend it for days that you need a hug in the form of a good bowl of daal.

What are your go-to recipes to stay cool in the heat?

To Read

The Crane Wife

A few months ago I read the essay “The Crane Wife” by C.J Hauser in The Paris Review and it struck a chord, with not only me, but a million other readers. When I read it every friend I sent screenshot of paragraphs had their own paragraphs they had screenshotted as well, and their own reflections to share. Since then, I’ve been waiting for the book of the same title, and when it published in July, I started reading it instantly. The book unravels and explores stories of love that have shaped the author, stories about people who have been part of her formation, stories that have not served her well and need to be untangled. I did not get all the references and essays but I loved most of them and overall, thoroughly enjoyed the book. The observations are sharp and careful and the writing is stunning. I took notes, photographed pages to remember, underlined emphatically, scribbled in the margins and altogether was satisfied with the book.