aeroplane mode: being the favourite patient; can moss teach us patience?
she said 'sporadic newsletter' and she meant it
Hello,
Because it’s been so long (as promised) a reminder that this is Aeroplane Mode: a newsletter for me to share my published writing on anti-productivity, wildness and having a body in the world.
In his newsletter, author Brandon Taylor (I highly recommend his novel Real Life) talks about how, as writers, our instinct is often to focus on the meaning of a thing, rather than on the thing itself. He cites one of his writing teachers, who once told their class that “we were very good at depth and what we should focus on was surface.” What happened, for how long, to whom, and why.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and specifically how it relates to the way I write about chronic illness. My illness is a way into an idea, a means to talk about social media and productivity, loneliness, grace. But what happens if I try and talk about the illness itself? Word after painful word of what occurred, when, why, between whom, and what it physically and emotionally (rather than intellectually or conceptually) felt like? What happened is that I ended up with the most difficult thing I’ve ever written: a very personal essay for Hazlitt on wanting to be my doctors’ favourite patient. The closest to memoir I’ve ever come.
I hope all the surface makes for a good story. But let me tell you, I can’t wait to get back to writing about depth.
Richa x
It’s April 2021, the start of India’s deadly Covid-19 Delta wave. I am standing in the parking garage of a hospital in North Goa. Hospitals around the country are so overburdened that doctors have begun to plead for oxygen supplies on social media. Here, the Covid wing has spread to the garage. Patients are being treated with IV drips on makeshift beds where cars were once parked. I am trembling with fear. I have tested positive for Covid. I haven’t socialized with anyone in over a year, I have N95 masked, and yet here I am.
Standing next to me is the doctor overseeing the Covid wing. We’re waiting for the results of my chest CT scan. I’ve never met this doctor before, and if my scan is clear, I hope I won’t need to meet him again. The CT was ordered because I’ve been struggling to breathe, and in these five minutes of apprehension, it would make sense to try to fill my lungs the best I can. Instead, I’m doing everything in my power to get the doctor to like me. I’m asking about his time here, listening closely to his responses, being self-deprecatingly funny. I’m barely aware of it, but I’m giving it my all.
I’m not a people pleaser. If anything, I’m a fairly unfriendly person. I have proudly never cared whether people like me. I have close and steady friendships, but making myself palatable to strangers and acquaintances has never been my interest or my forte. And yet, in this terrible place, waiting for the scan results, my heart racing with anxiety, I want this doctor to like me. I need him to like me.
And he’s not the only one. In fact, he’s just the latest in a long line of medical professionals whose approval I have sought.
I leave the hospital-garage that day with a clear scan. But the incident stays with me. What went on in those five minutes? Whatever it was, it’s been going on for the past nine years, too.
Read the rest of my essay, The Favourite Patient, on Hazlitt.
Ever heard the saying ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss’?
A lively family debate broke out at dinner over what it means. My mum and uncle felt it referred to rootedness and responsibility—if you keep moving, you can’t form meaningful relationships with people and place. However, I thought the phrase warned against stagnation and rot, the historical English parent to ‘Keep calm and carry on’.
But I was wrong, and, as it turns out, it wasn’t an English saying either. It’s an old Latin proverb cautioning people against shirking the duties and cares that come with putting down roots. And while it’s now known that moss doesn’t have actual roots, it does take a remarkably long time to make its home on a rock, and certainly never on a rolling stone.
I found myself pondering rolling stones and mosses thanks to a book by Potawatomi scientist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer. Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses weaves together science, ecology and indigenous ways of knowing in a rich, detailed account of the mysteries and magic of mosses—which, in many ways, doubles as an account of time itself. Kimmerer writes: ‘Raw rock is inhospitable to mosses… And yet…given enough time, mosses will blanket a rock [in] green carpets.’ What counts as ‘enough time’, though? Humans and mosses have very different answers.
Growing up in Kodaikanal, moss was everywhere. Parrot green carpets, spongy and sodden, covered the rocky outcrops of the montane grasslands. Sitting on one during a hike meant you were certain to walk away with soaked trousers. As young children, the pine and eucalyptus forests where we fashioned clubhouses and make-believe homes had darker green mats crawling up their tree trunks. We would gather this moss and use it to ‘cook’ fantastical meals. I remember once collecting alluring chunks for a middle-school diorama. They stayed green far beyond the project deadline.
The wonders of moss enveloped much of my childhood, perhaps because this was a period when I could pay attention to it. As kids, time stretched expansively in all directions: long days, longer summers, a sense that things would go on forever.
Moss contains this sense too. It exists at an inconceivably slow pace, and yet it has blanketed vast portions of the planet for the past 350 million years (just pause for a moment at that number). In a world that sees time as money, productivity as ethical imperative and the ticking clock as inescapable, can the attentiveness of childhood, and what Kimmerer terms ‘learning to think like a moss’, change the way we see time?
For the last print issue of The Kodai Chronicle, a superb indie magazine from my tiny mountaintop hometown, I wrote about the mysteries and magic of mosses, and how they can change our perception of time.
Other things:
What changes when you make money: what happens to art, to community and to the self? I urge everyone to read this wonderful, expansive piece.
“Realism is the fairy tale we’ve been telling all this time about our own exceptionality." This piece on the nonhuman world and literature floored me.
What does getting “better” mean when your physical or mental health is a nonlinear path?
I had a very challenging time recently, and crawled into some of my favourite TV shows. Mum, Rev (Olivia Colman, anyone?), There She Goes (David Tennant, anyone?) and the very niche Twenty Twelve held me in good rewatching stead. British comedies not ramped up for American audiences are my happy place. That being said, I was probably the last person on earth to watch Good Omens, and it was the perfect cup of tea on a cold day.
I never know where to start with books, but here are a few I loved: Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym, Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai, The Outrun by Amy Liptrot, and my favourite writer of all-time, Ann Patchett’s new novel, Tom Lake. I also re-read Helen Macdonald’s books H is for Hawk and Vesper Flights, and they were as healing the second time around.
Recap:
The Favourite Patient, Hazlitt
Think Like Moss, The Kodai Chronicle
in a funny coincidence, I also discovered Kimmerer recently, and have been listening to her Braiding Sweet Grass, very slowly, a half hour every week or so. She has such a soothing voice. I want to listen to the Moss book next.