Samir Shukla
By Samir Shukla
Springy spring has sprightly sprung. Ok, ok. Enough with the descriptors. One gets giddy at winter’s demise, while the blooms of spring promise a fragrant slide into summer.
Let’s start over. It’s a spring day. I’m looking out of a window at the vista outside, gazing at an old, tilted oak tree that seems just a hair more angled than last year, ready to keel over one stormy day. A bird catches my attention. It is flying and hopping about munching on a bounty of food available as the ground warms, flowers pop up and trees reawaken.
It could be a migratory bird. One of those avian immigrants passing through. Those immigrant birds ignore human borders and fly around the world, as per their evolutionary instincts. They are the truly free inhabitants of our world. Let’s fly, avian instinct speaks, and in an instant, they’re off.
These migrations are about survival, yes, but are also about an innate need to thrive, to continue the species’ existence. When spring teases its arrival, many species embark on migrations, reverse of the migration they did for winter.
Humans are the top migrators. We are a restless species, given to run off to streets unknown, or faraway places, into the woods and onto the mountains, for safety, for riches, for survival, to explore, travel or maybe just to get to know ourselves a little better. We need to see what’s over there. This ability to move, and explore, has landed us in just about every corner of this planet.
One of the best means of self-exploration is travel, the temporary migration.
You can explore your self inwardly via reflection, meditation, and other means, but outward exploration, something that challenges your beliefs and comfort zones, can only be achieved via travel.
This joy of temporary migration anytime and anywhere we like is a gift that evolution has availed to us.
There is also permanent migration.
Ancient lands have lost many to resettlement in other lands. Those of us who have travelled to other lands to settle, uprooted families for better opportunities or safety, we have become bearers of dual narratives. We mingle stories of far places with new ones we adopt and inhabit. We fly back and forth between daily existence and memories of places we’ve been or have come from.
Sometime in the epochal past our ancestors walked out of Africa and spread out on the planet. They birthed diverse humans. Their descendants migrate internally in countries, within cities and towns, across oceans, deserts, and mountains.
We travel and migrate, as instinctive wanderers channeling our ancient ancestors, the first true travelers.
Now, there it goes. The bird, its belly full, bored of this spot, whirled above the trees, across the nearby road, and flew off to somewhere. Maybe it was a native bird and will be back. I wonder if it even has any appreciation of this trait, this ability to take off on a whim. It flies because it can, because it must.
Let us also fly, by all means, when we can or when we must.
Samir Shukla is the Editor of Saathee Magazine.
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Twitter/X: @ShuklaWrites
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