Let There Be a Horizon
By H.R. Zimmerer
An unfinished conversation can become surprisingly large in a small room. I move it from one task to another, revising what I said, supplying what I should have said, imagining a response that has not happened. By the time I am making dinner, it can feel less like one difficult conversation than the condition of the entire day.
At the shore, another scale becomes available. There is wind moving across water I cannot see the end of. The sea reaches the land in one place and continues beyond the portion of it I am able to watch. My thoughts have arrived with me, but they have not become the only movement in the scene.
I do not mean that the sea puts every human problem to shame. I dislike that easy correction. Someone worried about a child, a bill, an illness or a marriage does not need to be told that their life is insignificant beside a large body of water. The people we love are not less precious because the earth is old. A fear can be painfully specific and entirely worthy of care. What I sometimes need is not to make the concern smaller, but to stop allowing everything else to disappear around it.
There is a difference between giving something its proper weight and giving it every available inch of the room. A deadline belongs on a calendar. It may matter greatly. It may require effort, planning and an uncomfortable conversation. But it need not become an opinion about the value of a whole life, or a reason to stop noticing the person who has come to sit beside me. Closeness can make a thing feel enormous. That does not always tell me its true dimensions.
The horizon is useful because it will not cooperate with my tendency to draw the whole world around one point. Looking outwards, I encounter distance I am not required to fill. I do not have to know what is happening on every ship or solve the weather beyond the headland. I can stand in relation to something without taking responsibility for its entirety. For a mind accustomed to treating attention as a form of supervision, this is a considerable change.
The relationship is physical as well as imaginative. NOAA’s ocean-literacy resources describe understanding the ocean’s influence on us and our influence on it. The coast is not a painting placed at the edge of a human world. It belongs to the same connected earth on which our homes and obligations exist. Knowing more about it can deepen the experience of standing there. The view is not less remarkable because there are explanations for its movements.
I am not always able to go to the sea, and I would not like peace to become another thing requiring a particular postcode. What I want to carry home is the practice of allowing a wider view. The sky above a car park can be larger than the thought that has followed me into it. A field beyond a fence can continue past the place where my eye stops. Even looking up from a desk can interrupt the impression that the next task is the edge of existence.
Perspective should return us to our lives with greater usefulness, not provide a more elegant way to avoid them. The list still needs attention. An apology may still need to be made. The difficult conversation may require a clearer second attempt. I want enough room around those things to meet them without turning every practical problem into a prophecy.
That is what the poem is reaching for when the water becomes louder for a while. The unfinished business remains mine. I am not leaving it on the shore for someone else to collect. But I can listen to the sea and remember that my responsibilities exist within a life, and that my life exists within a world I will never see the whole of. When I return to the list, there may be a little more space between the thing that needs doing and the story I have been telling about it.
Further reading
- Ocean and Climate Literacy, NOAA – resources explaining our relationship with the ocean and the earth’s wider systems.
Room for the Sea
The sea is already there
when I arrive,
creased with wind,
bringing its whole body
to the edge of the land. I have brought an unfinished list.
A conversation I keep revising.
A small, crowded version
of the world. For a while,
the water is louder. The people I love
do not matter less.
But there is room around everything. I can hold a difficult thing
without making it
the size of the earth. When I turn for home,
nothing on the list has changed.
Only the space
in which I am carrying it.
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