Beyond the Blue Horizon

The horizon is a line separating the sky from the earth.  There is no actual line present although it appears to be present, as though some tangible boundary.  By standing on a rock or chair or, for that matter, a ladder, you can extend the horizon, which is to say that you can enhance your vision so that the horizon seems to retreat, allowing you to see a greater distance of earth, proportionate to the increase in height you achieve from the viewing point.

You could in theory, go on, increasing your scope of vision by raising your point of vantage. As many before you have spoken of broadening or increasing horizons, you speak from time to time of increasing your own
horizons or broadening them.  The meaning, however much a metaphor at the time, means you wish to see more, understand more, have an increased vision of some cosmos or the entire cosmos.

To that end, you attempt the equivalent of walking about on tiptoes—anything to allow you a greater vision, as though the mere extension of range will provide the intelligence to distinguish like from like and from unlike, as though input alone can be enough to transform itself into accurate, useful information that might be used to assemble some useful insight or awareness of some small part of the universe at the moment unknown or, if known, incomprehensible to you.

You associate the term and concept of horizon as a navigation device by which you plot your course of awareness of a destination every bit as abstract as the concepts of insight and understanding.  

The most useful device for increasing the scope of your horizon is equally an abstraction; it is the imagination.  You have experimented with the imaginations of others, enjoying opportunities to see how others have made it possible to see well beyond where they stood or climbed.

You have even used certain substances given the euphemisms of conscious expanders, which ought to have had remarkable effects and did, but wonderful as they were, their origins were outside you, hints, as so many things outside of you are, of things you might do with a little or a great deal of imagination of your own. With imagination, you are able to chart orbits and outcomes, transporting yourself to places you have visited in fact or in dream.  You have seen outcomes in your own life and the affairs of others that stand as rivals to actual outcomes, struggled to grasp and understand the qualities that make a person, place, or thing plausible in story and in real life.

In many ways, you have expanded your own horizons by the simple process of observation, but most important of all to you is the ways in which your regard for another person can expand your horizon, demonstrating emotions and responses you assumed to be beyond your upper registers.

You have learned the most valuable lesson in life and in drama, which is that you push things toward that horizon where the sky appears to meet the land or sea, then you shove a final shove of parting, sending the circumstances cascading over the line, where you must follow.  It is there, as you observe the wreckage of that final shove that you imagine the strategy for cleanup, and you know what to do next.