by David D. Horowitz.
“So beautiful,” I’d whisper to myself, as I watched the midday sunlight brighten the blue-white mist above Puget Sound and, further west, the Olympic Mountains. I needed the beauty and sense of limitless freedom that my five-second mini-vacations provided me, a wage earner in a downtown Seattle office tower. I needed what a day at the beach provides: a sense of possibility, unshackled from rigid schedules and deadline-dreading haste.
I always appreciated having a job, whether I was an office temp doing data entry for a hospital’s billing department or a conference room attendant catering a law firm’s meals and keeping its kitchens immaculate and supplied. But simultaneously my mind and pulse longed for the beautiful, the eternal, the infinite, a horizon unblocked by packed agendas, urgent email, stressed staff people needing a coffee-fueled respite, and broken machinery requiring immediate repair.
And so, in the midst of the harried hurry, I frequently, albeit briefly, turned to the horizon—at dawn just after I arrived, when the eastern sky glowed blue, salmon, pearl, and gold; at midday when blue-white mist conveyed tranquility; and at dusk when cirrus stretched the length of an opalescent western sky. Glancing out from behind a twenty-first or forty-third or fifty-eighth story window I refreshed myself and returned to my typing and tasks with renewed purpose. And even when the sky glowered gray, and whitecaps roiled below fierce gusts, I could relish their vitality and feel cozy working indoors. Regardless of the weather, the horizon always felt like a shore, a beach where I could release restraints and reconnect with something infinite.
For here was mystery amidst a deluge of data. Here was beauty a glance away from fluorescent buzz and file-stuffed beige, gray, and white steel cabinetry. Here was my true complexity—and where I found sustenance to endure tasks and recommit to doing them well. And though I’m now retired, I recall fifty-eighth story peeks at a hazy horizon with fondness equal to compliments for properly catering a lunch or typing two hundred sets of addresses by a 5:00 p.m. deadline. I’ll always keep a horizon in my heart, deadline-free.