'The Nomadic Alternative'

Movement is the best cure for melancholy, as Robert Burton (the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy) understood. 'The heavens themselves run continually round, the sun riseth and sets, stars and planets keep their constant motions, the air is still tossed by the winds, the waters ebb and flow ... to teach us that we should ever be in motion.' All birds and animals have biological time clocks regulated by the passage of celestial bodies. They are used as chronometers and navigation aids. Geese migrate by the stars, and some behavioural scientists have at last woken up to the fact that man is a seasonal animal. A tramp I once met best described this involuntary compulsion to wander. 'It's as though the tides was pulling you along the high road. I'm like the Arctic tern. That's a beautiful white bird, you know, what flies from the North Pole to the South Pole and back again.'

Bruce Chatwin