flocking to the familiar
Where I live on the East Coast of Canada, we have a building supply store called Kent. About a year ago, I moved to a small town to study horticulture in the beautiful Annapolis Valley. There’s a Kent at the end of the highway off-ramp, and one night, my boyfriend was driving me back to the valley after a visit, and we saw something that we’d never seen before.
Crows. Hundreds, if not thousands of them, just standing in the empty Kent parking lot. The trees next door were laden with crows. I’d never seen so many in one place! Sure, we’d seen crows flying home to roost before. They were mostly just standing on the ground. A sea of black feathers, beady eyes glinting in those huge lights that look like they belong at a stadium. It looked otherworldly. We pulled into the parking lot and let the car crawl forward. Crows merely glanced over or hopped around. They seemed unbothered. This was home to them.
The next day, I asked some of my classmates who grew up in this area what was going on with all the crows in the Kent parking lot. They told me that Kent building supply store has only been there for about two years. It reduced the size of the adjacent forest considerably when Kent moved in, and now these crows, instead of finding other trees to roost in, still come to roost with their crow families.
It seemed bizarre to me, until I realized that humans do the same thing. We keep returning to things in our lives that aren’t ideal, because it’s what we’re used to. We look in places where everyone else is, where it’s impossible to stand out or position ourselves properly. To me, it’s a metaphor for modern dating. We know there’s apps and a couple popular pubs. But it doesn’t make a lot of sense to keep going there when it hasn’t yielded any quality matches.
Getting a spot in the tree means forgetting all that overcrowded parking lot energy. Find a better tree. Take a class, join a rec club, go to a talk, volunteer for a cause. You’ll have a way better chance of meeting quality matches, or at least finding grandmas who want to set their grandkid up with someone like you!