Training Ground

I am reading Living Islam Out Loud, edited by Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur and composed of real life stories by Muslim American women. Asra Nomani starts her piece by describing her childhood conception of “leadership” as something outside herself, possible by others, meant for others, never to be embodied and embraced by herself. Something about that description made me put the book down and think, “hmm.” And from “hmm” came the urge to muse a little bit, for a little while, in the ways of the Peanut Gallery. So here I am.

Nomani’s struggle to embody leadership hits home…and hard. A couple months ago, I began to figure out that I have an internal roadblock, a voice telling me incessantly I can’t achieve my out-of-the-box dreams because I don’t know enough, I’m not good enough, I don’t know the right people or the right steps and everything takes too long and is too complicated. Being married to an entrepreneur who is constantly cooking up something fresh, I am often inspired. But unlike the calm practicality with which he takes steps to convert his epiphanies into cool inventions (he calls it “execution”), I tend to get perplexed and give up on my ideas almost as soon as I begin to conceptualize the steps it’ll take to bring them to life. Something about the reality part of creativity throws me for a loop.

Nomani states, “[l]eadership often emerges at times of crisis when we are faced with critical and fateful choices.” For her, that moment came when she was treated as second-class at her local mosque and realized that most Muslim women were treated similarly at mosques across the nation. Her leadership emerged in response to that crisis. What is my crisis? What will jolt me out of my inability to believe myself capable of applying my intellect and determination to the creation of cool new books and businesses and other crazy, beautiful stuff?

In some ways, I have already been jolted. Shocked, shaken, thrown into the middle of leadership. Not in the form of literary projects I envision – not yet, anyway. So far it has manifested in the form of taking control of my mother’s financial future and resolving a number of pending business and investment matters in the wake of my father’s death. Yes, it’s been a year and a half since he passed away. A year and a half since I’ve been doled these responsibilities. A year and a half that I have felt overwhelmed. But I have been imbued with a new sense of leadership, fostered by the urgency of crisis.

If I can make it through that mess, with money and real estate and insurance companies and all that boring-but-scary practical stuff, then maybe it won’t seem so foreboding when I apply it to my dreams. I shall consider it lessons learned in execution.