Should I migrate north by a different route than in past springs? But if you go looking for trouble, you will probably find it. Isn't that what our mothers and grandmothers told us?
There certainly are practical advantages to using a familiar route. But travel is supposed to be about adventure.
Didn't I just go through a similar experience of looking for a new route a couple summers ago, and then ran into quite a disaster with a wheel bearing on the travel trailer? All in all I was quite lucky, and left the experience determined to grease the bearings on a more regular basis.
Rationally, the new route had nothing to do with the wheel bearing disaster. But that wasn't how I felt at the time. It is not going over the top to see my feelings as old-fashioned "religious" guilt.
Recall Gilbert Murray's "The Five Stages of Greek Religion," now available for free on archive.org.
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| I still carry a few paper books around with me. But I am glad eBooks have replaced them. |
On page 30 or so, he says:
"Agriculture, for instance, used to be entirely a question of religion; now it is almost entirely a question of science. In antiquity, if a field was barren, the owner of it would assume that the barrenness was due to [offence] somewhere. He would run through all his own possible offences, or at any rate those of his neighbours and ancestors, and the steps he would take [would be to] satisfy his own emotions of guilt and terror, or the imaginary emotions of the imaginary being he had offended.
A modern man in the same predicament would probably not think of religion at all, at any rate in the earlier stages; he would say it was a case for deeper ploughing or for basic slag. Later on, if disaster followed disaster till he began to feel himself a marked man, even the average modern would, I think, begin instinctively to reflect upon his sins."
Primitive fears like this are actually in my head right now. As Murray says (page 36 or so)
"Yet the fact remains that man must have some relation towards the uncharted, the mysterious, tracts of life which surround him on every side."
"...some attitude not of the conscious intellect but of the whole being, using all its powers of sensitiveness, all its feeblest and most inarticulate feelers and tentacles.
The Uncharted, as Murray calls it, shows how the Enlightenment and modern rationality only sit on our top layer of skin. You don't have to scratch very deep before you still find a superstitious peasant hiding in there. That is why it interests me to see this illustrated in something as humble as choosing a new migration route in a day or two.
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