The Pull of Forward
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
There is a hunger in us older than language,
older than the first fire cupped in trembling hands—
a feral insistence that tightens the chest
when stillness lasts too long.
It is not ambition.
It is not restlessness.
It is something closer to migration.
We feel it when the horizon refuses to stay put,
when the known begins to rot under the weight of repetition,
when comfort curdles into a quiet kind of suffocation.
The body knows before the mind dares to name it.
We are not built for arrival.
We are built for becoming.
Inside the marrow of us lives a directive—
an untranslatable verb that means
go,
learn,
make,
transcend,
again.
This is why stagnation wounds us
even when survival is secured.
Why safety alone never satisfies.
Why the soul starts pacing
long before the feet move.
The pull of forward is animal, yes—
but it is also sacred.
A covenant etched into our nervous systems
by ancestors who walked until the map surrendered,
who crossed ice and ocean not for conquest
but because standing still meant extinction.
Progress is not greed.
Curiosity is not betrayal.
Growth is not ingratitude.
To want more life—
more understanding,
more skill,
more truth,
more beauty wrestled from the raw—
is not a moral failing.
It is a biological inheritance.
We are driven not by dissatisfaction
but by possibility.
Each improvement, each discovery,
each hard-earned evolution
is the species whispering to itself:
We are not finished yet.
And so we keep going—
through doubt, through fatigue, through the ache of outgrowing former selves—
not because we are fleeing what we were,
but because something ahead keeps calling us by name.
Forward is not a destination.
It is a compulsion.
A gravity.
A promise that meaning lives in motion.
To resist it is to fracture.
To follow it is to participate
in the oldest story humanity knows—
the endless, imperfect, magnificent act
of reaching beyond ourselves
and becoming more alive in the reaching.
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