On mosses and enduring
And a more sustainable model of endurance
One of the concepts that’s been integral in my life is that of endurance.
It’s a concept I’ve been reflecting on a lot lately given the current state of reality—both the world’s as well as my own personal reality.
The Cambridge English Dictionary lists two main definitions for “endure”:
to suffer something difficult, unpleasant, or painful
to continue to exist for a long time
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary lists four:
to continue in the same state
to remain firm under suffering or misfortune without yielding
to undergo especially without giving in (suffer)
to regard with acceptance or tolerance
These have all been true definitions in my life, but I feel like they don’t quite go far enough.
Endurance athleticism
As an endurance athlete and thru-hiker, I connected most with the definitions having to do with suffering: to suffer something difficult, unpleasant, or painful; to remain firm under suffering or misfortune without yielding.
Each physical endurance effort was about not giving up, about absorbing pain and discomfort and continuing on. If I did yield, it was a temporary yield to pause or take a break, but in terms of completing the task itself, I never yielded.
Training six days a week for triathlons, logging hours on permutations of swimming, cycling, and running—often in the same day?
Definitely unpleasant, at times painful, and difficult.
Those hundred-mile bike rides I did, wrung out and spent and wondering with each hill why on earth I signed up for this?
More unpleasant, painful, and difficult things to endure without yielding.
The nerve pain I developed in my feet 200 miles into the Appalachian Trail, and then continued to hike another 2000 miles with?
Definitely an unpleasant, painful, difficult thing to undertake without giving up, giving in, or yielding.
Hiking for days in the rain, wearing the same soaking wet clothes I’d been wearing, shivering when I put them on, never feeling fully warm or dry, my feet in a constant pruned state?
Unpleasant and difficult, to say the least.
Long Covid endurance
Once I developed Long Covid (LC), the difficult, unpleasant, or painful thing switched from being an activity I consciously chose to engage in to the mere fact of existing in my body. For a long time, I awoke with varying symptoms on a daily basis, and I never quite knew how my body would react to things.
For example, the first year, I had a low-grade fever for over 40 days straight. Enduring that was a whole other form of painful, unpleasant, and difficult.
What would actual yielding have looked like here? I need look no further than the LC patients who’ve committed suicide to know.
But in LC, I discovered another nuance to the act of enduring, an element of the final Merriam-Webster definition: to regard with acceptance or tolerance.
While I had no other alternative than to navigate my LC, my attitude toward it has definitely changed in the last five years.
In the beginning I was impatient, waiting for it to “be over,” to “recover.”
Then, when it became clear that wouldn’t happen, I was in a constant state of grief, at times full of rage and anger, other times deeply sad.
Over time, I gradually got to a place where I tolerated—and, later, accepted—that these parameters and this reality were my new normal and had to be sorted out. A huge piece of living with LC for me is this acceptance. I’m not some kind of beatific saint; I just got to a point where it seemed silly to keep fighting the reality and to just accept it, incorporate it into how I approached my life, and do my best to live peaceably with it.
And today?
Now, in 2025, I find myself returning to the idea of endurance and enduring and feeling a bit differently.
There’s much that we’ll need to endure this year and the next few years. There’s also likely a lot we’ll need to fight—whether to fight against or to fight for. Enduring now is as much about continuing existence as anything else—particularly for those of us whom the current U.S. government doesn’t want to acknowledge exist. The very act of existence becomes an act of defiance.
But one way or another, it’s going to be an endurance effort.
And this time, I find myself taking some inspiration from mosses.
Yeah, you read that right: mosses.
2024 was the year of moss for me, when I started photographing, identifying, and researching mosses (because apparently fungi weren’t enough).
I recently read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s delightful Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, which I highly recommend if you’re even a little bit of a moss nerd.
In it, I discovered that Kimmerer and I both strongly relate to Thuidium delicatulum, a moss that looks a bit like tiny fern fronds:
I wrote a little love note about this moss, too:
I also discovered that mosses are endurance superheroes. In part, this is because they can generally regrow from the tiniest of clippings.
But it’s also due to their ability to tolerate an extreme lack of water, something which would kill basically any other being. Kimmerer explains this beautifully:
…most mosses are immune to death by drying. For them, desiccation is simply a temporary interruption in life. Mosses may lose up to 98 percent of their moisture and still survive to restore themselves when water is replenished. Even after forty years of dehydration in a musty specimen cabinet, mosses have been fully revived after a dunk in a Petri dish. Mosses have a covenant with change; their destiny is linked to the vagaries of rain. They shrink and shrivel while carefully laying the groundwork of their own renewal. They give me faith…
Poikilohydry enables mosses to persist in water-stressed habitats which more advanced plants cannot endure. But this tolerance comes at a serious cost. Whenever the moss is dry, it cannot photosynthesize, so growth is limited to brief windows of opportunity when the moss is both wet and illuminated. Evolution has favored those mosses that can prolong this window of opportunity. They have elegantly simple means of holding on to precious moisture. And yet, when the inevitable drought arrives, their acceptance is total and they are beautifully equipped for endurance, waiting until the rains return. (37-38, emphasis added)
As I’ve reflected on this passage, I realized that the mosses, via Kimmerer, are introducing me to a new model of endurance, one that is not about pushing through pain or difficult times but is more about continuing to exist though them instead.
We might consider this model to consist of three parts:
Thriving and doing all the most exciting things we can when we’re presented with brief windows of opportunity with the elements we need.
Doing our best to extend those windows.
Totally accepting when they close by hunkering down and waiting until another window presents itself.
It’s certainly a model that I try to emulate as someone living with a chronic illness. There are days and weeks where I can’t do much more than just survive my days.
Then I may get a day or two where things fall into place: I have energy, I have enthusiasm, I can engage in a creative or physical pursuit that’s otherwise out of bounds.
I’ll ride that wave as long as I can, and then I return to “just” surviving.
This form of endurance feels like a good model for us all to consider this year.
We can identify the people, communities, activities, or rituals that provide us with that extra bit of spiritual or emotional water to sustain us through the desiccated times.
We can do our best to cultivate those opportunities and to extend them as much as we’re able.
And then when they pass, we can totally accept that they’re gone and it’s back to desiccation survival.
Rinse.
Repeat.
Just look down
The next time you’re feeling really down, head outside for a short walk.
Look down, whether it’s at dirt, walls, fences, pine needles, or sidewalk.
Eventually you’ll find some moss.
And perhaps, like Robin Wall Kimmerer and me, that moss might give you just a bit of hope. That we can ride out the dry, drought, desiccated times by cherishing the drops of water we have.
That we’re all beautifully equipped for endurance.
This is, as ever, beautiful writing and being. Thank you. X