Ah, the wisdom of Johnny Depp. We can imagine Johnny’s saying the words in the title above (which quotation sites do attribute to him) in one of those Pirates of the Caribbean movies where the good guys must cross big expanses of ocean to fight with the bad guys or to find a safe haven for themselves. But can’t each of us imagine calling out–“Now, bring me that horizon”—as a way of living our lives? The origin of the word horizon is from a Greek word that means bound or define and is akin to the Latin word for boundary. Dictionaries remind us that one use of the term horizon relates to the limit of a person’s mental perception, experience, or interest.When people want to “broaden their horizons,” they want to broaden their “outlook, perspective, and perception.”

What determines how far out are our individual horizons? Someone said once that we all live under the same sky, but we don’t all have the same horizon.Personally, I’m glad we don’t all have the same horizon…because I like the variety of what all of us see “out there” in front of us. I like a miscellany of perspectives and perceptions and areas of interest among the people I know, the authors I read, the commentators I listen to.

But isn’t it sad when someone doesn’t seem ever to be looking out at a horizon? Maya Angelou, the poet, said once in a conversation that having a horizon means you have space to place new steps of change. And Zora Neale Hurston, the wise novelist, said that no matter how far a person goes, there is still a horizon “way beyond you.” There have been times in all our lives, I know, when it was all we could do to stare at the ground and watch our feet taking one tentative step after another. Then there was the day when we were able to lift our heads and look off into the distance. We raised our eyes to the horizon. We saw a sunrise or a ship far away in the distance or a magnificent mountain rising out of the earth and looking as if it were touching the sky. We saw some new possibility. Something desirable to aim for. Something worth making changes to be able to reach. Something truly important that inspired us to make new commitments.

John Steinbeck, in that delightful book of his, Travels with Charley, talks about his beloved companion:

Charley is a tall dog. As he sat on the [truck] seat beside me, his head was almost as high as mine…. It is my experience that in some areas Charley is more intelligent than I am, but in others he is abysmally ignorant. He can’t read, can’t drive a car, and has no grasp of mathematics. But in his own field of endeavor…he has no peer. Of course his horizons are limited, but how wide are mine?

Yes, how wide are mine?

A great question. A question that reminds us that there are horizons. That all of us determine how wide our horizons are. Just to ask the question is a wonderful thing, for it means that we haven’t forgotten that our eyes can be fixated on some spot that provides little of Maya Angelou’s “space to place new steps of change.” Or our eyes can be up and looking outward to new and newer possibilities in the distance while we call out, “Now, bring me that horizon!”