About Existential Migration
Someone who has an "existential" motivation to travel, unlike economic migration, simple wanderlust, exile, or variations of forced migration.
Crossing Borders Used to Be the Privilege of the Few
In recent years, many men and women have left their home countries to follow someone they love. Even though building a life with a partner from a different culture is in itself a slightly different experience than “Existential Migration”, I think they relate. I found that overtime, it switches to a deeper experience where self-actualising and assessing your own identity is revealed.
In the past, love wasn’t the big deal, what was more critical was the capacity to bear children (and I dare compare here) Queens-To-Be went through a similar journey. Maria Theresa of Spain when she left the Spanish Court to marry Louis the XIV, Mary-Antoinette to marry Louis XVI or Ekaterina the Great to marry Peter III of Russia. They left their culture behind to embrace new duties, new responsibilities, a new life, a new role, at times even a new religion and overall a new destiny.
Maria Teresa, Infanta of Spain is an oil painting painted from 1651-54 (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez), Metropolitan Museum of Arts
We might romanticize these transitional moments but in reality they are painful ones, often taking years to ease up all the sorrows. Through that pain, you get to touch upon some of the themes identified by Madison:
The importance of trying to fulfill individual potentials
The importance of freedom and independence
Openness to experiences of the mystery of life
The valuing of difference and foreignness as a stimulus to personal awareness and new perspectives
New Perspectives on Communication
So many new words have been coined in the recent years. One of the things that gives a bit of a weird feeling when you leave your home country is when you return for a short stay and you hear people talk. They speak a language your understand but there is no way you will not be confronted with new vernacular or everyday speech. Even if you yourself were a master of that language in the past, time has passed and now hearing these new words gives you a weird feeling.
To me, it’s hearing the adoption of a lot of “anglicisms” in both French and Russian day to day language that is a bit uncanny. Maybe because I used to have a distance with English, but now it’s my day to day tool for self-expression. Seeing it being applied as a “foreign entity” in a French or Russian context is something I expected but not with this kind of embedded reach.
To illustrate the “feeling” I will share this amazingly rare recording of a speech by Nicholas II. It was delivered during the visit of French President Emile Loubet to Russia, in May 1902.
As a French-Russian speaker it’s incredible to listen to this.
One of the lessons for me in terms of communication is the gained self-awareness. You become sensitive to new patterns, especially those conveyed through language. What groups or unites certain people, how to share knowledge, thoughts, and basically how people with a shared language and geography grow together and at which speed even.
According to Greg Madison, who coined the term:
‘Rather than migrating in search of employment, career advancement, or overall improved economic conditions, these voluntary migrants are seeking greater possibilities for self-actualising, exploring foreign cultures in order to assess their own identity, and ultimately grappling with issues of home and belonging in the world generally.’
Read the paper on the term coined by Greg Madison