A horizon of here

I look at the horizon sometimes, mesmerised at the fact that I can see something I will never be able to reach. I remember it took me some time as a child to grasp the concept. I kept asking where exactly that ‘horizon’ was, as if it were a geographic spot and I needed the exact coordinates. I see now that it is an impossible aim, a dream. Why did we humans feel the need to define this line? The unreachable. Was ‘here’ not enough…? Do we need a carrot in front of our eyes to keep us walking? Walking to no end, with no end.

I think about what lies in my horizon, in my future. In the ‘not here’ that the horizon symbolises. If the horizon is the final goal, I would like it to be a ‘here’. To be here, and not eternally somewhere else. A horizon of here. Maybe I made that task impossible, by placing it in the unreachable. Or maybe I brought the horizon closer, psychologically speaking. If all the answers are already here, why would I keep walking? My horizon is ‘here’. Both in the sense that being here is my goal and that the unreachable was always within me.

All that comes to my mind now is the idea of flow, which is ridiculous considering that I’m trying to bring the horizon ‘here’. And yet, my mind keeps pushing this idea, intuitively, from ‘nowhere’. Well, from ‘here’, I guess. There comes a point when words are so imbued with symbolism that they don’t mean anything anymore. But I’m not a poet yet…

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

It’s interesting that the horizon is defined by a line. A line that defines night and day. A line that unifies two planes, Earth and sky. An inbetweenness, like a window separating two realities. Ironically, the precise spot where I stand.

Here, in between Earth and sky, I stand in someone else’s horizon, in the very spot they want to reach, as they look at me from the distance. And I think… if you only knew… there’s not that much here that you don’t already have there. Except what it symbolises. It is their unattainable goal. Their idealised ultimate end. Their end of the road. I think… it’s exactly as the spot you’re standing on already… Yes, it is. But they’re not looking down, they’re looking forward.

And I look down now, in what is both a reconsideration of my own ground and an act of humility, and I wonder if I, too, am already standing in the horizon. If it was always here, not there. Standing in between. Sitting on the doubt.

I am just blind, aren’t I…?

Each and every thing I see
Takes me back before I was me […]
We have seen what lies beneath the earth
Everything that has ever been and will become
We have seen the world for what it’s worth
Everything that’s in between can still be done
Just one day is all that we needed so we could believe it all
In some way we already knew it, we just had to prove it all

Two door cinema club, Pyramid