You're sitting at your desk, two hours into the working day, and you get the urge. You suddenly feel deeply unhappy about staying still. You want to get up and go for a walk. You want to talk to a colleague. Anything to get away from this static, boxed-in workstation. For two hours, you've been perfectly content to tap, tap away at your computer, but now, your chair feels like a prison, and the keyboard feels like a chain.
These moments of sudden restlessness come for all of us sooner or later. It might be at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday, but it could also be three years into a new home or too long without a holiday. And this itchy-footed, dissatisfied need to move and to change has a German word: zugunruhe.
Flight lust
In this week's Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with the nature writer Rob Macfarlane about The Book of Birds, and I asked him about migratory birds. In his book, Macfarlane covers various German ornithologists who have tried to identify the mechanisms behind seasonal migration — what triggers the bird to suddenly take wing and fly for months?
"It was in effect a sensory deprivation experiment, which was trying to work out what the signals were that instructed birds to move," Macfarlane said. "Was it day length, for example? So, if you blacked out a migratory bird inside by draping cloth over the cage, would it receive those diurnal circadian signals or not?"
The sadder bit of the experiment was when those caged birds felt their own urge. There is some aspect of their being that desperately needs to migrate, and so, the birds hop about restlessly. They flail against their bars. They chirp and cry in tortured restraint.
"Zugunruhe," Macfarlane said. "It's the German phrase for what they saw: flight lust, the urge to move."
A twitching body in a gilded cage
Certain birds need to migrate — they twitch about with a flighty compulsion to take off to some distant land. The bird does not rationalize about the moment (it's somewhat hard to imagine a bird rationalizing); it just has to. It's what they do.
The reason zugunruhe is so compelling is that it mirrors something we all experience as well. "I think we experience it sometimes as humans ourselves," Macfarlane said. "And some people are naturally very itinerant. And when they are caged or tethered or anchored, then we know a version, I think, of that restlessness that expresses itself in a twitching body."
As someone sits at their desk in the springtime — on the first truly pleasant, sunny day of the year — they get an urge to go outside. When someone's wilting in a going-nowhere relationship, they get that need to fly. When someone is tired of visiting the same places and seeing the same things, they know it's time to migrate to somewhere new.
Zugunruhe is the itinerant desire of any animate being to keep moving and growing.
Free birds don't pace
It's easy to pathologize zugunruhe. As Pascal put it, "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." But there's also something primal and undeniable about that itchy-footed need to change.
The problem is not with the bird's wanting to migrate. A bird flaps and sings to the proteinous beat of DNA. All living things inherit how to behave. The problem is the cage. When those German scientists trapped their birds, they were forcing them into a condition that was both unnatural and felt wrong. The birds knew that they shouldn't be locked away. They were meant to be flying thousands of kilometers to find a mate and carry on their genetic line. Free and happy birds don't pace.
So, too, with humans. The sudden twitch of zugunruhe is a sign that things are wrong. It's telling us that we were never meant to be like this. Sometimes, we might find ourselves thrashing at the bars of an unhappy cage — a relationship we can't stand or a job we're forced to trudge along to. At other times, the cage might be ornately gilded. A comfortable life of quiet ease and amicable small talk is constricting in its own way. That urge to walk out of the office and never come back — that's the human zugunruhe.
Zugunruhe is not a fault of the bird or of the person. It's the fault of an environment that forces a migratory species into an iron box. It's the fault of a world that makes itinerant, exploring, running, wild species wear a suit and smile at a boss's bad joke. Zugunruhe is a sign that something is wrong and, sometimes, the only way to fix it is to take flight.