Beyond the Blue Horizon

When I was balancing work, study and family to get my degrees in my 30s and 40s, the song ‘Beyond the Blue Horizon’ (as sung by Lou Christie on the Rain Man movie soundtrack*) became my inadvertent theme tune.

Beyond the blue horizon

Waits a beautiful day

Goodbye to things that bore me

Joy is waiting for me

I felt that my life would start when my studies ended. It was less about gaining qualifications that might or might not lead to something new, and more about ending the very long slog to get them. Something better would be beyond that blue horizon. My eyes were fixed on it, and the present was something to be got through.

In the process, I somehow managed to make a dead space of both the present and the future, by focusing purely on survival.

Yes, what I was coping with in the present was utterly exhausting, but it was still my life. You cannot ‘put life on hold’, however much we like to use that expression.

Equally, although I was working flat out, I was doing nothing to positively envisage and shape my future. I just believed it would be better over the horizon, if only by the absence of the study and the job I was then doing.

Twenty years on, I still love the optimism of the song. But I think of the blue horizon not as some fixed, distant, hazy line between me and better things, but as something which informs and is part of my present picture and which will move as I do.

And I know that there are other horizons beyond it that I can’t yet see from where I am.

Having changed career again at 60 – and that’s certainly an horizon I couldn’t have seen from where I was standing in my 40s – it’s the next two lines that now resonate most:

I see the new horizon

My life has only begun

They capture the excitement of constant renewal, constant new possibilities.

What’s over your blue horizon and how is it positively informing your life in the present? And, more importantly, vice versa?

What’s beginning for you?

*song written by Harling, Robin and Whiting, 1930