HORIZON

Most of us have stood in a place like this. The edge of a field, a beach in the evening, a window on a high floor. The land runs out ahead and meets the sky in a thin line.

As a child you think you could walk there. Later you learn that the line moves with you. Take a hundred steps and it is exactly as far away as before.

What changes is the person looking. The horizon you watched at ten is the same one you watch at forty. The light on it is different, and so are you. You notice other things. You stay a little longer.

Heraclitus said the river is never the same river, because the water keeps moving. With the horizon it works the other way round.

It stays. We are the ones who flow past it.

Maybe that is why people go quiet in front of it. It is one of the few things that has seen us at every age.