Who doesn’t like observation towers? On a clear day, overlooking hills, woods, villages, streets, cars, rivers, a toy landscape at our feet. We like that. This wide horizon closing around me almost like a circle. And all the things to see!
Nevertheless, my thoughts wander directly to the horizon that limits my view. What is hidden beyond it, beyond the horizon?
To want to know what is hidden beyond the horizon, not only as regards the visible, but also my knowledge, my experiences, my abilities.
The appeal of novelty, ambition of a discoverer. To explore the hidden. To trace the hidden. Beyond the horizon of my limits.
Broadening horizons, that’s what it’s all about:
How did people live 500 years ago, how do they live today in India, the children there, the old people.
What did I forget of the things I learnt, I experienced, of the things that were important to me, the people I spent time with? What’s the matter with all these things today?
Could I live in an igloo? What’s it like living for a few months without the computer, the car or the phone?
What would it be like to give every month double of what I am used to give or to donate?
Could I imagine to take part once in the service of a church that is alien to me, without prejudices?
Are there areas of life that are completely unfamiliar to me? A specific music, to repair a car, to visit a football match, to read a history book, to visit our member of the Bundestag?
Broadening horizons not as a false self-fulfilment, an ego-trip or ultimate excitement, no, that’s not what it’s all about, it’s not about becoming a butterfly flying from flower to flower.
Broadening my horizon also broadens my understanding, my empathy, my sympathy.
Though broadening my horizon exceeds my limits, it also makes it clearer that I will remain limited. Every answer I find to a question raises three new questions until I reach the point that I know that I know nothing. Let’s awake our thirst for knowledge, let’ start to be interested, active, let’s be curious again!
- For my birthday I received a particularly beautiful wine glass with a colourful box. Besides many sweets this box contained small folded slips of paper. On each of them a year of my life was written. To drink together from a glass, to draw a year and to remember it then and to talk about it, that was the present, an invitation to broaden my horizon into the forgotten land.
- African fever, that’s the book title of 40 years of experience of a journalist on and with this continent. Since I have been breathing in the scent of the tropes in his lines – “It’s the smell of heated bodies and drying fish, rotten meat and roasted kassawa, fresh flowers and rotten water plants…” - I breath in more often in life, pay attention to our smells, not only in the kitchen or in the garden but also on a busy street, in the train, during a lecture…I sniffle beyond the horizon of my common perception.
But please, no stress at broadening your horizon.
The right dosage is important.
Let’s say to leave once a year for “a new country”, in the best case for the one you are most interested in. Or to learn something, a language, an instrument, a … what you always wanted to learn. A trip?
Still, you can absolutely peek every day beyond “the horizon” of familiar things:
- How did this emerge or how was this developed? The electric cooker? The slippers?
- How and why does this work? The phone? The ball pen?
- How was this thing when I was a child? The computer? Flying?
- How does one proceed in China, in Central Africa? At the dentist? At a funeral?
As a precaution I have to say that it’s not about knowing much, not about “Who wants to be a millionaire”-knowledge (with all due respect). It is about broadening your horizon setting your understanding, amazement, appreciation, gratitude, empathy and sympathy free.
Livinglifeasart Exercise:
- Take part in a guided tour in your city (or the closest one). Try to take part like a tourist.
- Try to find out how your maternal grandfather and grandmother met each other. Don’t give up too early, it might take years.
“All of us live beneath the same sky but we don’t have the same horizon.”
Konrad Adenauer, first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany
“Where would we get if everybody said where would we get and nobody went to see where we would get if we went.”
Kurt Marti (*1921), Swiss reformed pastor and writer
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