(Re)Learning to Fly
This post marks one week in India. I haven’t done enough exploring yet, what with the big bad virus and the big bad AQI (early winter in Delhi means heavy air pollution). But I’ve seen some things and done some things. That’s what this post is about.
This post was originally published in the SneakyArt Post, my weekly email newsletter. You can see it in its original form here.
✈ How to go East
I chuckled while explaining to people back home that my flight from Vancouver to New Delhi would be going ‘west to go east’. The counter-intuitive idea is that if you keep going west for long enough, west becomes east. It’s a funny world.
But when I glanced at the flight path on our screens, the plane appeared to keep going north. We climbed up British Columbia, then the rest of Northern Canada. I expected it would soon turn west, but it went up and up and up. How bizarre, I thought, it’s like we’re heading to the North Pole!
Then it struck me that this was another way to go east.
We would go up from the west, until up became down, and thus end up going down to the east.
I guess there are advantages to being on a spherical planet. If only you stick to the course, west can become east, and up can become down. Flat-earthers don’t know what they’re missing.
⏪ Jamais Vu
The flight from Vancouver to New Delhi was my first time at the airport since arriving in Canada late January, exactly 10 months ago. I did a lot of familiar things - checking in my bags, passing through security check, walking to the gate, and waiting for the boarding announcement - but all of it felt unfamiliar and uncomfortable.
Jamais vu is the experience of unfamiliarity in a situation that is actually very familiar. It is the exact opposite of deja vu.
Dear reader, I want to tell you that jamais vu is stranger and more disconcerting than deja vu.
I foresaw two big challenges during the 14 hour flight to New Delhi -
😷 Wearing a mask the whole time, and
😴 Trying to sleep at the right time to minimize jet lag
Staying masked for so long proved a lot easier than I expected. But trying to stay ahead of jet lag didn’t work out at all.
Taking the time difference into account, the effective strategy was to stay awake for the first half of my flight, and then sleep right through the second half. If I did this, I would arrive in New Delhi in the early morning, fresh and ready to take on the day. I would hit the ground running.
But this did not happen. I slept in fits and bursts, and although I arrived not too tired, I feel that it didn’t matter anyway. Because jet lag is slippery and deceptive. It stays out of sight for most of the day, then sneaks up on me in the early evening. Even if I stay up all day, and am tired when I go to bed, I keep waking up in the early hours of the morning, after only half a night’s sleep. Then I am drowsy again at noon. It’s about to be a full week, and my body is not done messing with me.
(I am typing these words at 5:30am on Friday.)
