Leaning into the Diversity Migration

The danger in refusing to enter into relationships with anybody who is not enough like us is that it not only leads to potential lost opportunities for rich friendships—it also hurts our progression as people because differences can lead to growth and learning and new strength. Diversity is truly our polar migration just like the snow geese or whales of the animal kingdom. It’s a test to see if we navigate the sometimes difficult conversations that differences present successfully. And if we do, we will all become stronger individuals, community members, and global citizens.

I’ve long been fascinated by the complex and sometimes extreme measures some species take to follow their natural instincts, chemical drivers, or personal desires to follow migratory patterns. These migrations happen for different reasons. Some animals migrate to mate, others do it to find better feeding grounds, and still others do it for the safety of where they plan to raise their young.

Some animals migrate from one pole to the other every year which means they travel the length of the entire circumference of the Earth dozens of times over their lifespan. Some migrate through incredibly treacherous and face unfathomably difficult conditions to make it to where their internal signals dictate. I think about salmon traveling upstream, leaping several meters high waterfalls, literally dashing themselves bloody all for the sake of traveling back up to their native spawning grounds, using their incredibly senses of smell to help navigate to the precise spot.

Some animals clearly make conscious choices about how they live their lives, but yet they travel such huge distances to do vital things like teaching their young how to hunt and defend against predators. I recently watched a documentary highlighting a pod of orcas of the coast of South America that do something no other pods have ever been recorded of doing. The grandmother generational orca is training her progeny how to sail into the shallows where seals feel safer and riding a wave to swoop under seals and knock them into deeper water and then riding the undertow back into the safety of deeper water so the orcas don’t get stuck.

Why would animals go to such huge lengths to migrate or do other very hard things that certainly mean in a real sense the loss of many members of the species? Wouldn’t it be more sensible to just stay home and gather what food there might be nearby or deal with the mating partners in town rather than going to such incredibly lengths and heights and difficulty to follow their natural migratory paths?

Of course, in even contemplating these questions I’m exposing my clear human tendency to devise a way to make something easier so I can be lazier. Most animals don’t have the cognitive ability or consciousness to adapt like this. But I do see at least a couple of good reasons why species evolve such elaborate requirements.

We live in a world with finite resources. That means that there’s a constant competition among species and among members of the same species to get enough food and other resources to survive long enough to pass along their genetic information through mating. Also tied to the finite resource reality, natural selection is a very cold and completely impartial judge. There’s no fairness in the natural world. That gazelle that so valiantly trudges across the Serengeti is just as likely as almost any other in the herd to become food for a crocodile. So in order for the species to continue to exist, these hard tests of migration can act as a proving ground so that those species that make it to the spawning ground are likely to be the strongest members of the species.

And all of this leads to our species. Homo sapiens are very much animals too, though we don’t really fit the mold and haven’t for the last several millennia. We have figured out ways of surviving in the harshest environments and conditions and have become one of the most successful species ever seen despite the fact that we are certainly not the strongest or the fastest, or the biggest animals. I think about our stone age ancestors who really only had one thing going for them: they need how to work together to solve problems. It was that ability that led to the extinction of so many large land animals that hadn’t known predators like us before.

And though we might not migrate from one pole to the other in the hopes of finding a large hoard of fish to feed on, we certainly reach across the world today in what would have been seen as miraculous ways by people just a few decades ago. So we have the tools to reach out to practically anybody in the world at any given moment and we are masters of our own destiny to a degree unlike any other species and we have evolved so that corporation is absolutely hardwired into our brains. We have all we need to have the most remarkable collaborations worldwide to solve much larger issues than how to take down a singly wooly mammoth.

But yet we are so drawn to our evolutionary culture of self-identifying with small groups within our species with which we build in and out groups. Social scientists have shown that we have severe limits on the ability to build deep and meaningful relationships with a lot more than 150-200 people. And that’s okay. Those couple hundred relationships can be extremely rewarding. The danger I see is when we refuse to enter into relationships with people who are not enough like us. And not only does this tendency lead to potential lost opportunities for rich friendships. It also hurts our progression as people because differences can lead to growth and learning and new strength. Diversity is truly our polar migration test and if we navigate the sometimes difficult conversations that differences present successfully, we will all become stronger individuals, community members, and global citizens.