musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Etched upon the Horizon


Now that I am retired, I am sometimes overwhelmed by the amount of time I have to myself. Unlike the time brimming over with things, and filled to the top with purpose to which I had grown accustomed, what greets me each morning in my autumnal years is as empty as a refrigerator on shopping day. That’s not to suggest it is empty of projects, or bereft of occasional shards of joy, but rather it lacks the motivation that used to feed my efforts from day to day: the goal just beyond my reaching fingers.

There was a time when I thought I might be able to journey to the horizon one day and see what lay beyond. I knew there was something magic over there because when I was very young, my father would sometimes tell me stories about it at bedtime. I don’t know whether his father told the same stories to him when he was young, but he sometimes didn’t read to me from a book, so I assumed he was just making them up for me; like the horizon, I felt very special.

“Do you know what you’re going to dream about tonight, G?” I remember him asking me one night.

I shook my head, wondering if maybe he did.

“Well… Do you think you can ever reach the horizon?” he said with a twinkle in his eye.

I told him that of course I could reach the horizon; if I kept on walking, I could even reach the distant mountains no matter how far away they seemed.

Then a smile slowly captured his face, and his eyes began to twinkle -a sure sign that I was mistaken. “But when you make it to the mountains, is there no more horizon? Has it really disappeared, or were the mountains just tricking you?”

I thought about that for a moment, and when I couldn’t decide, he reminded me that anyway I lived on the prairies in Winnipeg, so there were no mountains, there were no such tricks. I could walk as far and as fast as I wanted and never reach the horizon; unlike mountains, it would move away as fast as I approached. “Sleep’s like the horizon sometimes, isn’t it?” he suddenly asked me with a wry smile. “No matter how hard you try, no matter how tightly you close your eyes, sleep only comes when it comes…”

“But…” I was old enough to suspect I was still being tricked. “Have you ever been to the horizon, Daddy?” I asked, already sleepy with the cadence of his voice.

“We all have, G,” he said in his soft bedtime voice. “Just over the horizon is where our dreams live; it’s a separate world we can only visit when we’re asleep and we’re invited in.”

“What’s it look like?” I asked, yawning.

He sighed and tucked the covers around me, I remember. “There are wonderful colours there, and a soft, warm wind on your face… And then, one by one, the dreams begin to come out from behind the trees where they were waiting for you.”

“Are they friendly?”

“They’re like your favourite friends you play with at school.”

That was the start of his stories about the horizon -the place I could never reach by an act of will; the place that was special because no matter how hard I begged, I still had to be invited. And, even so many years removed, his words still echo in my memory. I long for the peace of that Kingdom, and its innocent slumber of pleasant dreams, where sleep knits up the ravelled sleave of care, where sleep is the balm of hurt minds. But for me, especially before I retired, it had become the place where I had murdered sleep; the place where I was no longer welcomed; it was not the Horizon of my father…

His Horizon was a place not only for dreams, but for memories, too; a place I could sometimes still capture for a moment, although it usually slipped through my fingers like warm sand on a beach: dreams of actually touching the horizon as a child after listening to my father’s stories, of touching impossible things that I still crave even though I am old enough to know better. It’s saudade, I suppose: the presence of absence. I wrote an essay about that a few years ago[i], albeit in a different context. But although there are probably no boundaries for saudade, no clear definitional tenets, I fear the craving has infected me again: a longing for something that probably never was -something, at any rate, not attainable. It is a nostalgia for the innocent hopes of childhood, perhaps, and yet I cannot go back. I even find it hard to believe I was ever there…  

Still, the memory of that time arose again, Phoenix-like, when I came across the fragments of an essay by Rebecca Solnit entitled The Blue of Distance: ‘For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.’

No matter what acknowledgement I feel is due to me by virtue of my age -indeed, by virtue of my very presence for so long in the world- my agency now seems diminished as my branches wither; the horizon is no closer, no more manipulable than it was when I was a child listening to my father’s voice. If only I could go back to his horizon and work my way from there. If only there were a way to find the place again. No prize for arriving, no applause from others who had already arrived; his smile would be enough I think. After arriving in that Brigadoon, I don’t think I’d ever choose to leave again…

[i] https://musingsonwomenshealth.com/2019/06/19/saudade-considered/

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