"Each time you visit, you tell me about more friends who have left the country. I understand them, particularly the young people who want to know the world, study, see something, and who don't feel bound to this place by a sense of responsibility to work already begun or by a feeling that there are some things a man does not walk away from. And yet when I think about it, it seems to me that a decision to leave is always appropriate when...someone conceives of study chiefly as the gathering of information. If one is after truth, however, on had better look for it in oneself and the world fate has thrown one into. If you don't make the effort here, you'll scarcely find it elsewhere. Aren't some of these departures an escape from truth instead of a journey in search of it?"
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
It's not that I don't believe that the spirit can move one, like Abraham, to "lekh l'kha," - "get thee out...and go to a land that I will shew thee" (Genesis 12:1). But one should also be open to the fact that at times the spirit calls one, as it did to Havel, to sit tight, to stay put, even in a difficult place.
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