“For the fun of it”

Why do starlings participate in huge synchronised Murmurations?

My alternative to the “confuse predators” “fear of predation” idea comes from the viewpoint of the individual starling.

You are a gregarious starling in your prime. What better pastime could you choose than to mix it with your own kith and kin and indulge in a really fun, cool exhibition of aerial acrobatics?

Behaviours need not be only for survival. Birds and many other animals are also known to do stuff for fun!

Why, oh why did you do such a thing? When someone asks me that, I pose the question to myself. The first answer usually comes out, in private, “For the fun of it!”.

Unimportant areas in life often shrink the meaningful, or occult the valid and the valuable. In school, when a lesson in progress showed up as relevant, usable, with useful facts to ingest, I reacted against practicality.

I understood that factual structured information posed an unwelcome threat to my flights of fancy. I would fight to hold on inside my personal space, where I could wander free, wild, unchained, take risks.

I knew full well that being elsewhere, neither present nor correct in the room full of rows of other students, was potentially damaging to my future.

I wilfully ignored the danger, because the fun concocted by my imagination was sweeter, more alluring, more addicting than even my beloved chemistry practical class!

I approach my 80th birthday. From here I can see by siding with fun, I closed many roads to life’s successes. Why did I often choose not to go where I was supposed or expected to go? Today I get it that I was defending myself from and holding on to a variety of unrecognised, unresolved childhood traumas.

I recent years, with help, I buckled down to travel successfully into and beyond the grisly lands of trauma, fear and self-sabotage.

I regret nothing. Early on, my intellect lacked time spent developing self-discipline. My imagination roamed involuntarily then and now  by choice in unboundaried intriguing landscapes.

These decades of mental air-ballooning have gifted me with a fine mysticism. I balloon out there, up up and away, now directed somewhere, now floating where air, water, light and love flow

~ Love is present EveryNow