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Sitting on the chair at my grandpa’s house while sipping some tea, I took a view of the dying day in, as the dim sun started setting down at the horizon spreading an orange hue over the scattered plain clouds, over one third of the sky. The view was mesmerizing, like nature is in mood today, to show off its artistic skills. I wanted to take that view all in before it vanishes away, but I knew I was running out of time.
It was just a matter of time before it all distorts and then disappears before my eyes, and the time won’t be more than few minutes at best. Although the view was giving me a calm bliss, but I noticed I am also a little sad. There’s something about this painting that’s hurting me within.” Because it’s going to fade away soon, is this why I am feeling a little sad or is it something else” I asked myself. I couldn’t give an answer to myself then, but as I grew up, I realized the answer soon enough.
The constant search
Humans have this tendency to search for the least miserable and most pleasurable space in any given situation, whether we succeed at that or not is a different thing altogether, but we try every time. What else can we do? We have to try, we do it consciously, subconsciously, or sometimes unconsciously, but we do it all the time. Being a conscious entity compels you to perform a constant search for happiness, pleasure, joy, and such, and through all this, for something else. Even when it looks like you are not into it right now, you actually are.
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We can’t escape it; we have to take part in it constantly, and it is a choiceless choice we make from the second we wake up to the last conscious second, and even in dreams. Though we do satisfy ourselves from time to time, there’s always this lingering feeling of unfulfillment that doesn’t seem to leave us alone. Even at one’s most intense moment of happiness, if they can see, they will find that still, subtly, the search hasn’t stopped. It may be that what they were searching for is now appearing really close, but they haven’t had it just yet; there’s nevertheless some minuscule distance, still present.
Use of the Edge of the sight as a metaphor
Horizons have been linked to life in many different ways in different literatures. There is an alluring nature to them that makes us relate our lives to them in one way or another, but the most prominent thing about horizons, that actually relates to our lives, gets mostly overlooked. Horizons have a very special property attached to them, a very significant one to us actually.
As you may know, you can never reach the horizon, yeah bummer, right? It appears close enough to raise a small temptation to even give it a try, and if we didn’t know better, we might have tried too. It’s really incredible that one could reach a distant star, millions and billions of miles away by keeping a persistent momentum towards it but can never reach the horizon which appears to be hardly a few miles away no matter how long or how fast they travel.
I know that it’s because a horizon is not real, but a horizon is not just a mirage; horizons are different from mirages or any other optical illusion in a way that they can be seen from everywhere, and no matter what angle or approach you take, if you are in a clear space, they will never disappear.
Also, the distance between you and a horizon will never subside. This is the phenomenon, that relates and fits magnificently with our continuous search for something, this distance, which may appear to have shrunk at times, but never fails to be there is more relatable to us than anything else. In the case of our search though, the issue is our never-ending thirst to have that something, we can’t give this up, the funny thing is even in giving up anything, we are actually searching for the same notion as we were searching for before, in that thing.
Imagine if we had this continuous, strong, above all desire to reach the horizon, to be at the place where the sky meets the land. We would have spent all our lives in search of horizons or in trying to be there. It would be a really bizarre life, trying to be there where you just can’t be, not now, not ever. It’s a good thing that we don’t have this unquenchable thirst for horizons and yet, aren’t we all in the same exact situation though?
Our entire lives are a race to get something that we see right there in front of us just like a horizon, sometimes close, sometimes far, and yet, something that is as unreachable as a horizon is. This is the SOMETHING we want to have when we are running and again this is the SOMETHING we want to have when we are resting. Something in our lives plays the role of horizons, something that we want even in completely opposite things, like some can want it in violence and others can want it in love, some in war and others in peace.
What are you searching for?
So, what is it that we want to have? In crude terms, you can call it happiness, as I did earlier and as we all usually do, but happiness is such a broadly defined word that it doesn’t have much precision. What we want is close to satisfaction; there’s a hint of desire in our wants that compels us to fill ourselves to the last bit whenever opportunity presents itself. But satisfaction isn’t a word with any deep meaning either; we still need a little more refining.
Well, there’s a word “bliss” which we use whenever we are referring to high-quality happiness, a happiness which comes on the rarest occasions, but then again, if it comes to us even at the rarest of times, it can’t be compared to horizons. There’s only one word I can think of which has a close enough meaning to what I am referring to, CONTENT.
Content can also be taken as satisfaction, but content has a different meaning than satisfaction. Pleasures, happiness, joy—all are mediums to reach content. When you are joyful, what you are actually feeling is a promise of content, a feeling that this is going to fill you up, this is not going to go away. The feeling of joy or pleasure gives you a false hope that you are on the threshold of content, of complete fulfilment, and this happens every time we get joyous.
Don’t get me wrong; you can be satisfied with pleasure or joy, just like you can be satisfied with many mundane things, but satisfaction is cheap, people get satisfied all the time. Heck, you can urinate and be satisfied, but you can never be content; it will never be enough for that.
Now, we all know satisfaction doesn’t last long; however, what I want to draw your attention to is that even when you are satisfied, you are more empty, not full. Situations and events we take as ecstasies in life are still not enough to take us to our ultimate goal. After an orgasm, you feel emptiness, not fulfilment; the satisfaction of an orgasm is in emptying yourself, it’s a recoil, so that you can soon run again, chase again. Actually, you are running in satisfaction too.
The sweet pain of the minuscule distance between you and the apparition of content is what we call PLEASURE. It doesn’t even matter what we are chasing; we are all chasing the exact same thing. When we get satisfied or bored with something, we realize that what we want isn’t here, and then we start doing something else. Just like when you drift to sleep after sex, the tired body sees content in sleep now, which it saw in sex previously, and when you wake up, the search will continue again.
Have you ever wondered why the price of happiness keeps rising every day? It’s simply because the more accessible happiness becomes, the more it is proving to be ineffective and ineffectual, so we are raising the price of happiness. It produces a placebo effect; our minds are programmed to think that if something has a high price, it must have something worthwhile in it.
Another thing noticeable about horizons is that they seem to shift further away from you as you try to get closer to them. The farther you go, the more they shift away. Content is just like that too; it always appears a few blocks away from your current position, and when you get to that block, it will appear across the street, and when you cross the street, it will again appear a few blocks away.
Mostly, there are two kinds of people: one kind that chases content in a linear progression and the other that does the same by changing lanes. Some people try to find fulfillment in a single relationship their whole lives, and they take momentary satisfactions as an illusion of nearly attained contentment, while others jump from relationship to relationship for the same. This is the exact two-way procedure people perform on various other aspects of life, like careers and hobbies.
There is one other thing that happens with horizons: when a person is standing in the direction of the horizon, far away from you, it will appear to you that they are closer to the horizon than you are, or they are at the horizon. But in reality, from their point of view, the horizon is equally far away from them as it is from you, and this happens to everyone, all the time.
As I said, it wouldn’t be an issue if we could just stop this search, but we can’t. It’s obvious, but still, most people seem not to understand that they want absolute, not relative. We are designed to want it until our last breath; we can’t help it. You are bound to want it in wanting, and you are bound to want it in not wanting. Satisfaction is an inferior alternative, a nostrum with which we somehow manage every day just to continue this search.
So why you can’t reach it?
It is obvious why we can’t ever reach a horizon; it is simply because horizons are just illusions. They are only an appearance; they are not in reality; there is no place on earth where land and sky meet. We all know this fact, but why is it that we can’t reach fulfillment either?
That is the real issue here. Well, this is why I said horizons have significance for us, just like them CONTENT IS NOT REAL EITHER. Content is only an illusion, a consistent one. Think about it, how can there be a state after which you need nothing, and I mean nothing at all? Imagine a state like that.
As a matter of fact, you even know a state like that; it’s DEATH. If there is no fluctuation in your being, no shift, you are completely static, then you might as well be dead. In fact, you are dead in this condition. As far as the living goes, content is more like an idea in our heads, and a fantasy in the world, a fairytale, after which every person, knowingly or unknowingly, runs. However, it is a fantasy with a tenacious and inescapable charm, which possesses everyone and anyone without fail.
So as you may see, horizons have more in common with our lives than we typically conceive. Nevertheless, even when you know that the actual goal of everyone, i.e., contentment, is as elusive to chase as chasing a horizon, the pull of this everlasting desire will not let go. Admittedly, even in knowing this and reaching a point of settlement with our lives, we are aiming at the exact unvarying fantasy.
You don’t want to run behind a chimera anymore; now, you are wishing to achieve some peace of mind, some rest, and in all that, you are still searching, or hoping for the CONTENT. So, what is the point of all this, knowing or not knowing? What difference does it make? To be honest, nothing in life makes much of a difference if we only look at the conclusion, but here, let’s not look at that.
Life is not black and white as far as everyday living goes. There are degrees to everything in day-to-day life. Though, one can’t halt this fruitless want completely, if one wants to continue living, one doesn’t need to either. It is not plausible to stop this want and neither it is practical or workable.
This want is at the core of everything we do. We can’t even get out of bed without wanting to be in content; if you don’t think so, imagine if there is going to be no difference in you by getting up, if there is nothing to gain or even to lose, physically, emotionally, or mentally, why would you ever get out of bed? Any reason you can still think of, for getting up, will only prove that this want is still present. I have been using the word ‘want’ from the beginning, but truth be told, this is not our want, this is our will, the will that we need to continue living.
So, what now?
But even then, one can exclude a lot of unnecessary things from their lives by realizing or by coming to terms with the fact that what they actually want isn’t even real, a large credit for our suffering goes to this dilemma of the horizon. This was the REASON for my sadness that day; I wanted to take all that bliss from the view and fill myself once and for all, but I couldn’t do it that day, or any day after.
By knowing that contentment isn’t even real, much less achievable, the pressure dictating you gets off of you. You are not going to find contentment in running and neither in resting, but it is still good to rest from time to time; you are not in dire need to keep running. Success is not that desirable anymore, and failure is not that scary either.
Truth to be told, the knowledge that there is no content in this world or any other world, for that matter, doesn’t turn your life upside down or drastically; it’s not some eye-opener either. In the deepest parts of our hearts, we all know all this already. Contrary to the usual belief, realizations and revelations cannot erase our misery; if applied in real life, the best they can do is make it manageable.
One thing to be remembered is that we are not miserable because we want happiness and we don’t have it; happiness is not that rare, one can be happy while sitting on a chair drinking a cup of tea while admiring sunset, we are miserable because of what we want FROM that happiness.
