Perpetual Quest

We live on a ball. The planet is a per­fect sphere. There is no way to see all of it at the same time — even from space. Get­ting a glimpse of it all requires some sort of jour­ney. Those few that get a chance to expe­ri­ence the view of earth from the Inter­na­tional Space Sta­tion see an end­less hori­zon in all direc­tions. The same thing hap­pens to those of us with our feet on the ground. It is a lit­tle more obvi­ous if you are in a desert on the ocean. A day at the beach will suf­fice. The beach goes on for­ever. Like Colum­bus, you can sense the cur­va­ture of the earth by see­ing ships top-first from miles away.
Liv­ing so that we do not see it all at once keeps us in motion. His­tor­i­cally, it has made human­ity a species of wan­der­ers. Some groups may not roam far, but they expe­ri­ence the beck­on­ing of the hori­zon none the less. West­ern Euro­peans devel­oped a real knack for world travel a few short cen­turies ago. Some were on a spe­cific quest. Many oth­ers were just wan­der­ers or drift­ing oppor­tunists.
It only takes a ten minute drive to get to the hori­zon around here, but it recedes. The ten min­utes are actu­ally never-ending. The joy of a sim­ple trip is par­tially the antic­i­pa­tion of what might be ahead. The rear view mir­ror can even trig­ger a sense of nos­tal­gia. We are always going toward and away from some­thing. There is no doubt that liv­ing with a per­pet­ual and cir­cu­lar hori­zon has shaped our thought processes. Peo­ple liv­ing among forests do not roam like those liv­ing in deserts. They do not expe­ri­ence as much of the haunt­ing hori­zon.
The world within is greater than the world with­out. Like the lim­it­ing hori­zon, you can­not think all of your thoughts at once. You can­not imme­di­ately remem­ber all that you have ever read or known. Each moment has its hori­zons of feel­ings and ideas. Inter­nal life is a jour­ney too — with end­less hori­zons of pos­si­bil­i­ties. It is strange that we can travel so much and sit still at the same time. What lit­tle we might see or expe­ri­ence beck­ons for more. The jour­ney is indeed eter­nal in dis­tance and quality.