Many years ago, when I was an intern in Medicine and Pediatrics in Rochester, New York, having just moved from the semiarid and open landscape of Southern California where in the winter I could see the snowcapped San Bernardino and San Gabriel Mountain ranges over fifty miles in the distance, I found myself experiencing for the first time in my life the wooded and verdant landscape of the Erie-Ontario Lowlands. That unfamiliar environment felt very oppressive and overbearing to me. Finding a horizon to look towards beyond the nearest group of trees, amidst the warm and humid summer days, created a closed-in sense of my surroundings. At times I even felt emotionally constricted, especially given the little control I had over my time, which was increasingly devoted to either training hours in the hospital, or to sleep.

The distress created by the inability to view more distant horizons was alleviated briefly when I visited a local shopping mall to purchase much-needed clothing. It was in an area of town that had previously been grassy farmland and thus relatively devoid of trees. With commercial development the area became studded with strip malls and the manifestations of suburban sprawl. Arriving, I suddenly felt relief as my gaze took in a more expansive sky and a few distant hills.  My nervous system settled into a more familiar landscape with a horizon at least a few miles in the distance, this deep sense of comfort resulting not only from the expanded horizon unobstructed by thick stands of maple and oak, linden, and elm, but equally by the presence of the strip malls that were so much a part of my childhood environment and so quintessentially Los Angeles.

At the time I did not realize the importance in my life of gazing toward horizons. In retrospect I can see how much of my sense of belonging, sense of awe, sense of possibility, sense of the cosmos, and hence a sense of meaning and purpose were connected not only metaphorically but also on a very physical level with horizons. I loved the feeling that I experienced gazing at distant horizons of jagged mountain peaks as much as I was enthralled by the silhouette of the city’s skyline against a pastel sky at sunset. To me they both represented the magnificence of the natural and human expressions of creation. They also reminded me of the personal and internal horizons beckoning to me, sometimes frightening and ominous, sometimes reassuring and comforting, but always reminding me of the uncertain and evolving conversation between the world of form and emptiness, and the world created by the mind and the imagination. As horizons, they form the boundaries of the world, and the growing edges toward which I move, volitionally or not.

Unfortunately, I am all too aware of how much of the time I have not been conscious of the leading edges of my experiences, nor intentional of my movement toward the horizons. Thankfully, while listening to a recent episode of the On-Being podcast called The Gift of a Voice in which Krista Tippett interviews the incomparable folksinger and cultural icon Joan Baez, I was comforted to feel quite normal in my unawareness. Joan’s shared that, despite her years of activism in social justice causes, and even with the backdrop of global warming, whether we hold it in awareness or not, we spend 95% of our time living in denial. Yet, she encouraged us to consider that for the remaining 5% of our time we can choose to be engaged in what the great congressperson John Lewis called us to get in good trouble, necessary trouble. Additionally, despite the reality of the world, its seemingly insurmountable challenges and imperfections, and its progression toward a precarious and uncertain future, she emphasized that hope is a muscle that can grow and keep us engaged in that trouble.

For me, hearing this seemed to bring the horizons, internal and external, into clearer focus and that, by virtue of being human, I cannot be expected, with my small human life, to resolve the inherent paradox of mostly living in denial of the state of the world while also growing the muscle of hope for something different. Yet neither am I exempt from being engaged, from considering reality as I experience it, from understanding the false and sometimes paralyzing illusion of insignificance that keeps many of us from acting, and from responding from that place of awareness. For at least 5% of the time there exists a choice of engaging with the thoughts informed by experience and turning those into actions that not only result in good and necessary trouble but could also be healing. And in this way, the small me can be in honest conversation with reality, a reality that is not so interested in my opinions or neuroses but a reality that needs my awareness to transform itself into action. Having this conversation and the actions that result have implications for the experiences of that reality by other members of my species and countless other sentient beings.

Our mindfulness practice can not only help us identify, explore, investigate, and relish in the horizons internal and external, but can also help us recognize the many selves and non-selves in constant conversation with those horizons. The cultivation of the muscle of hope required to carefully consider our actions influences the possibility of a brighter future and instills within us the humility to understand that the denial we inhabit allows us to live in the world. Additionally, our mindfulness practice helps us remember and then choose to devote that critical 5% to engage in good and necessary trouble, to address the implications of our inter-being, our interconnectedness, our mutual responsibilities for each other and for our world, and to see the uncertain, beckoning, and beautiful horizons that exist along the edges of our deepest callings.