Staying Or Leaving?!

There is not almost a single human being who at some point of its life didn't want to spread its wings and fly away. Reasons may vary from most simple or even green ones like escaping from parents' authority up to more severe ones like economic and political reasons or some other kind of pure survival ones.

Migrations are not something new. They exist as long as the humankind history itself, the individual ones the same as the large ones when whole nations would move, apart or together, from one place to another. (E.g., from Biblical times, the Jewish exodus from Egypt.)

In modern days, when with technology development, in that sense, the earth becomes every day smaller and smaller, turning into just a bit larger (global) village, packing the things and moving from one place to another became even easier.

The need or even the urge for the relocation is not strictly fixed to the people of a certain age, although I believe, the decision would be much easier made as younger the person is.

Every one of us at some point, especially at a younger age (teenage, the early twenties) dreamed of leaving the place where we were born or where we lived by that time, if nothing, because of that exploratory impulse somehow imprinted in our genes.

We are curious explorers by nature!

The other day, reading the @black-man's article This town on WhaleShares, for some reason I have been moved enough to leave him there a whole post size comment, sharing my experience on the subject, and which I want to share now with you too.

I have been hit with this (relocation/migration) urge twice in my life, although I wasn't living in some small town or village (like @black-man), but in a bigger city.

The first time it was when I started my high school somewhere at the age of 15 or 16 when I was blessed with the opportunity to visit Canada and the US for the first time, where many of my family relatives immigrated during or after the II World War.

I have been invited by many of them (including my own brother) to stay and live there. The temptation becomes even more significant when the same proposal arrived from my mother's cousin who at that time lived in New York (US).

She and her husband were an older couple with no kids, very well established and quite wealthy. (They were running some fashion business, owning their own production factory and living in a big house with maids and servants, in some elite area for the upper class.)
Besides just staying there, they offered me the best possible education and very likely to inherited all their wealth afterward.

In opposite to that, I was arriving from a relatively small ex-socialist and ex-communist European country (more or less being) behind the so-called iron curtain with a quite rigorous and rigid totalitarian regime.
Can you imagine what kind of temptation it was for me, especially at that age???

But two things were holding me back. The first and the biggest one wasn't my parents or my sister, but my Granny for who I knew was eagerly waiting for my return. I couldn't leave her there, in some sort of way alone, and especially not in the circumstances I was very familiar with.

I couldn't do it to her! I had a feeling that she would die if I don't come back. She was already a very old lady (over 80), but still, I couldn't do it. (Looking back from today's perspective, I know I bought her with my return at least an additional 10 years of living. She passed away when she was 95 years old.)

The second thing that was holding me back was the questions that popped up in my head, and I couldn't get rid of it.

"If everyone leaves, who would stay??? If we all go, who would fight against that totalitarian regime and defend the people? Who would stay to help and make a change?"

And that was the second reason why, despite my age, I decided to return home and stay.

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The second time I was hit with this urge to pack my things, my whole family and go anywhere else to start a new life, happened to me in the early '90s when my country literary overnight find itself in the middle of a horrifying, ugly war that lasted following 5 years.

It was the time of empty shelves in the stores, with darkened windows of the houses and complete darkness on the streets at night (so, the bomber aircraft wouldn't see the targets); the time of going to work avoiding snipers and driving in between tank mines.

I was in my middle/the late twenties at the time, married, with two kids (the older one was just beginning his elementary school) and pregnant with my third child, my youngest son. My husband lost his job, and every day we were waiting he would be mobilized by the army and taken to one of the first lines of battlefields.

At the same time, the salaries of those who were lucky to work and still be employed (like I was), dropped down on 10% of their previous amount, while the prices and living expenses remained the same. In addition to all these, I brought my mom to live with us in our small flat where we were living back then, as the area were she lived was way more dangerous.

The offer from the family abroad to leave the country and move out of the war zone arrived almost right away when the whole thing started and has been repeated for several times in the following years.

The same or very similar questions that were holding me back from leaving the first time hit me again. And again I couldn't get rid of them. I was asking myself...

"If we all go, who would stay???
Who would make this war to stop, this way or another???
Who would tell the world the truth about what is really going on here???
If we all go, who would fight and protect our homes, the people and the country???
Who would stay to help those that don't have the opportunity, resources or both to escape elsewhere, even for a short while???"

And, that's how I decided to stay again!

I have traveled the world before and after that, and I still do whenever I have the opportunity. But today, looking back on those past times, and everything we've been through, I'm still happy that I decided as I did.

I can't describe and express good enough the excitement I always feel when I'm returning home (to my country, to my home town) from those trips, and no matter how fascinating, better established or with way higher standards those places, where I'm returning from, were or still are.

There is not some particular good or bad neither in staying nor in going. Both of it (staying and going) are just two-sided coins.

The only important thing is that we observe them well and think about them deeply and through enough, so we would never regret whatever our final decision would be!!!

We are all free to choose our own path and destiny!

In my case, turns out that I have followed the following motto.

Grow where you have been seeded!

^{_{Photo from Pixabay. Credits to Anne_Schmidt for nature-flower-plant, used under the Pixabay license.}}

^{Part of this post I have been previously published as a comment on the WhaleShares.io, and some parts of that comment I have slightly changed or polished to create this article and for better adjustment for publishing it on Steemit.}

Posted on Saturday, March 16, 2019

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