Hello,
This is Aeroplane Mode, a very sporadic newsletter with links to my published work on wildness, anti-productivity, and having a body in the world.
In many ways, I’ve tried to let go of the calendar year: not only because of its pressures (achievement lists! resolutions!) but because it feels like a rigid, arbitrary way to consider time. Asking myself whether I had a ‘good year’ is a surefire way to send me into a spiral of misery. Instead, I prefer measuring my life (since measure I…must) in seasons, because they remind me that I am an embodied creature, rooted in place and weather and context. Did I have a good monsoon, my favourite season? No, I was plagued by migraines and anxiety, which I am still grappling with today. Did I have a good autumn, a season I rarely get to experience? Absolutely: it was one of maple trees, hojicha, and unexpected adventures. The seasons feel hopeful and changing, while the calendar year is fixed and unforgiving.
That being said, it has been a longstanding professional dream of mine to contribute to Hazlitt’s Year in Review series (I think I’ve pitched them at least three times before), and I’m really pleased to finally have a little essay in there. This was also the first year that I made more money from writing than I did from editing: something I always dreamed of doing, but never imagined I would actually achieve. (It only took a decade to get there!)
So maybe it was a ‘good year’ after all.
Richa xx
I live in a village in North Goa, in the last of four houses lining a quiet lane. On my first “practice walk,” I take barely fifteen steps away from my gate before becoming unbalanced, breathing under a cluster of bamboo trees. I then continue down the roughly tarred road, each step a victory. The next week, I succeed in extending my path, turning out of the lane, to the pale-pink training centre for catholic priests. A few weeks later, I make it down a sloping road, until I reach a large water tower: the village reserves. Here, I sit on a small strip of white concrete, before tentatively making my way home again.
These practice walks came about at the insistence of my physiotherapist, after an unexpected flare-up of the worst of my chronic illness symptoms: dizziness. Dizziness is the reason I can’t drink or dance. It’s the feeling of walking on a rocking boat, of losing my orientation in unpredictable ways. I first experienced this disabling sensation nearly eight years ago, and with time and effort, it had slowly, painstakingly, improved. So its resurgence was a serious glitch in my belief in recovery.
Just a day before my flare-up, I’d confidently walked to my mum’s house on the other side of the village, and back again. A week earlier, I’d ambled past the water tower and animal shelter to my friend’s apartment building. And now, here I was, trapped in a quarter-kilometre radius, creating a nonlinear timeline of doom in my head.
Reaching the water tower is the best-case scenario. Sometimes, despite the previous day’s progress, I turn back sooner, the open sky swimming in front of my eyes, the road a bouncy castle, the whole undertaking an act of defeat. But during this year of obsessively noticing my progressions and regressions, of despairing and railing against the universe, I began to notice something else: where I was walking; where I actually was.
Read the rest of my essay The Year in Practice Walks, about the biggest challenge of my year, over on Hazlitt.
Other things:
Palestine radicalised me. It was the first issue, all the way back in 2007, that made me go on protests, speak through a megaphone, occupy a building. Before anti-racism, before education-cuts, before feminism, before, before, before. There’s so much I could say now, but I’ll keep it to one thing: I know what it’s like, in the face of a terrible catastrophe, to feel that you’re missing context. And then desperately trying to piece it together from tweets and images and essays and infographics that keep unfolding in real-time.
Because Palestine is the only contemporary crisis I feel I have sufficient context for, here are some pieces of the context puzzle I recommend (they were all made before the current escalated genocide in Gaza):
Did the UN establish Israel? Isn’t this an ancient holy war? Why are there so many Palestinian refugees? Decolonize Palestine is an excellent, accessible starting point with historical 101s, FAQs and myths.
“Settlements” makes it sound like a benign collection of caravans, not armed civilians backed by an occupying force. This short May 2023 documentary looks at the complex surveillance machine that governs the lives of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, and the role illegal settlers play in this technological oppression.
This series of chronological maps and infographics is an absolute must-see. I’ve revisited it at least thrice since October. If you click on only one link in this newsletter, please make it this.
2023 writing recap:
Horrible Bosses, The Nib (coauthored with Sonaksha)
A History of How the Internet Shaped Our Sex Lives, Electric Literature
‘The Things We Take For Granted Hurt Us The Most’: An Interview with Jenny Odell, Hazlitt (their most-read interview of the year!)
What two great hornbills can teach us about Goa’s true wild side, The Indian Express Sunday Eye (coauthored with Shivangini Tandon)
Think Like Moss: Lessons in Ecology from the Forest Elders, The Kodai Chronicle
The Favourite Patient, Hazlitt
The Year in Practice Walks, Hazlitt
https://bdsmovement.net/
So good! <3