Horizon Scanning Quotes

Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow?

If our thoughts are slumping down into a muddling pie of oblivion, we must empower our minds to go beyond vain details or useless conventions. Scanning the reach on the horizon and challenging our imagination can allow us to recognize the essentials of our human condition and achieve harmony in our lives. ("Dirty bike)

Horizon scanning enables you to catch a glimpse of the future by observing fragments embedded in the present.

After spending most of her life scanning the horizon for slights and threats, genuine and imagined, she knew the real threat to her happiness came not from the dot in the distance, but from looking for it. Expecting it. Waiting for it. And in some cases, creating it. Her father had jokingly accused her of living in the wreckage of her future. Until one day she’d looked deep into his eyes and saw he wasn’t joking. He was warning her.

I sought a soul that might resemble mine, and I could not find it. I scanned all the crannies of the earth: my perseverance was useless. Yet I could not remain alone. There had to be someone who would approve of my character; there had to be someone with the same ideas as myself. It was morning. The sun in all his magnificence rose on the horizon, and behold, there also appeared before my eyes a young man whose presence made flowers grow as he passed. He approached me and held out his hand: “I have come to you, you who seek me. Let us give thanks for this happy day.” But I replied: “Go! I did not summon you. I do not need your friendship… .” It was evening. Night was beginning to spread the blackness of her veil over nature. A beautiful woman whom I could scarcely discern also exerted her bewitching sway upon me and looked at me with compassion. She did not, however, dare speak to me. I said: “Come closer that I may discern your features clearly, for at this distance the starlight is not strong enough to illumine them.” Then, with modest demeanour, eyes lowered, she crossed the greensward and reached my side. I said as soon as I saw her: “I perceive that goodness and justice have dwelt in your heart: we could not live together. Now you are admiring my good looks which have bowled over more than one woman. But sooner or later you would regret having consecrated your love to me, for you do not know my soul. Not that I shall be unfaithful to you: she who devotes herself to me with so much abandon and trust — with the same trust and abandon do I devote myself to her. But get this into your head and never forget it: wolves and lambs look not on one another with gentle eyes.” What then did I need, I who rejected with disgust what was most beautiful in humanity!

I don’t think he’ll go that far.’ Carter rose to his feet and scanned the horizon. ‘Our headquarters are in Brooklyn. And I’m guessing Manhattan is like Greek god central? A long time ago, our Uncle Amos hinted at that.’ ‘Well, yeah,’ I said. ‘Mount Olympus hovers over the Empire State Building, so –’ ‘Mount Olympus –’ Sadie blinked – ‘hovers over the … Of course it does. Why not?

Any path which narrows future possibilities may become a lethal trap. Humans are not threading their way through a maze; they scan a vast horizon filled with unique opportunities.

The loss of connection between churches and neighborhoods creates a corresponding loss of localized imagination and creates an addictive-like dependence on acontextual experts who scan the physical and spiritual horizon for 'success.

The most important thing to determine is what to do right now. Instead of scanning the horizon of your life, looking for things that need to be done, concentrate on the task before you

It's hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he's okay. It's hard to be the one who stays. I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way. I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that's been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence? Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow?

While you were looking outward, scanning the horizon for threats," he continues, "you missed what was happening in your own backyard. What was taking root right here, on American soil. In your towns, your shops, in your heartland. Among your friends, in your families. The sensible conservatives moving to the right. The right moving far right. The far right becoming alt-right. Becoming, in their rage and frustration, radicalized thanks to an internet filled with crazy theories, false 'facts' and smug politicians allowed to spew lies.

ENFPs connect relatively quickly with most people. But they want more than a surface-level connection and a few common interests: they are searching for a specific, intense relationship that both challenges and grows them. If they find this, they are all in. If not, the horizons are still being scanned for what else is out there.

Everywhere he went he saw this same phenomenon—parents unmindful of their children, their attention fixed on little glass windows in the palms of their hands, mesmerized like drug addicts, longing for some artificial connection while their own flesh and blood careened wildly through a chaotic and violent world behind their backs. The writer was even worse. He invented false worlds and peopled them with ghosts while his motherless son scanned the horizon for a human connection. It was shameful. What did a man need to lose to be shaken from his immersion in a dream? What terminal force could liberate him from the pursuit of phantoms and engage him in the living world around him?

Correct thinking provides a sense of certainty. Without it, we fear that faith is on life support at best, dead and buried at worst. And who wants a dead or dying faith? So this fear of losing a handle on certainty leads to a preoccupation with correct thinking, making sure familiar beliefs are defended and supported at all costs. How strongly do we hold on to the old ways of thinking? Just recall those history courses where we read about Christians killing other Christians over all sorts of disagreements about doctrines few can even articulate today. Or perhaps just think of a skirmish you’ve had at church over a sermon, Sunday-school lesson, or which candidate to vote into public office. Preoccupation with correct thinking. That’s the deeper problem. It reduces the life of faith to sentry duty, a 24/7 task of pacing the ramparts and scanning the horizon to fend off incorrect thinking, in ourselves and others, too engrossed to come inside the halls and enjoy the banquet. A faith like that is stressful and tedious to maintain. Moving toward different ways of thinking, even just trying it on for a while to see how it fits, is perceived as a compromise to faith, or as giving up on faith altogether. But nothing could be further from the truth. Aligning faith in God and certainty about what we believe and needing to be right in order to maintain a healthy faith—these do not make for a healthy faith in God. In a nutshell, that is the problem. And that is what I mean by the “sin of certainty.

With an amazingly balletic movement Zaphod was standing and scanning the horizon, because that was how far the gold ground stretched in every direction, perfectly smooth and solid. It gleamed like … it’s impossible to say what it gleamed like because nothing in the Universe gleams in quite the same way that a planet made of solid gold does.

The most wonderful part of building something together with a team is that you’re walking side by side with other people. You’re all looking at your feet and scanning the horizon at the same time. Some people will see things you can’t, and you’ll see things that are invisible to everyone else. So don’t think doing the work just means locking yourself in a room—a huge part of it is walking with your team. The work is reaching your destination together. Or finding a new destination and bringing your team with you.

Birthdays are a time when one stock takes, which means, I suppose, a good spineless mope: I scan my horizon and can discern no sail of hope along my own particular ambition. I tell you what it is: I'm quite in accord with the people who enquire 'What is the matter with the man?' because I don't seem to be producing anything as the years pass but rank self indulgence. You know that my sole ambition, officially at any rate, was to write poems & novels, an activity I never found any difficulty fulfilling between the (dangerous) ages of 17-24: I can't very well ignore the fact that this seems to have died a natural death. On the other hand I feel regretful that what talents I have in this direction are not being used. Then again, if I am not going to produce anything in the literary line, the justification for my selfish life is removed - but since I go on living it, the suspicion arises that the writing existed to produce the life, & not vice versa. And as a life it has very little to recommend it: I spend my days footling in a job I care nothing about, a curate among lady-clerks; I evade all responsibility, familial, professional, emotional, social, not even saving much money or helping my mother. I look around me & I see people getting on, or doing things, or bringing up children - and here I am in a kind of vacuum. If I were writing, I would even risk the fearful old age of the Henry-James hero: not fearful in circumstance but in realisation: because to me to catch, render, preserve, pickle, distil or otherwise secure life-as-it-seemed for the future seems to me infinitely worth doing; but as I'm not the entire morality of it collapses. And when I ask why I'm not, well, I'm not because I don't want to: every novel I attempt stops at a point where I awake from the impulse as one might awake from a particularly-sickening nightmare - I don't want to 'create character', I don't want to be vivid or memorable or precise, I neither wish to bathe each scene in the lambency of the 'love that accepts' or be excoriatingly cruel, smart, vicious, 'penetrating' (ugh), or any of the other recoil qualities. In fact, like the man in St Mawr, I want nothing. Nothing, I want. And so it becomes quite impossible for me to carry on. This failure of impulse seems to me suspiciously like a failure of sexual impulse: people conceive novels and dash away at them & finish them in the same way as they fall in love & will not be satisfied till they're married - another point on which I seem to be out of step. There's something cold & heavy sitting on me somewhere, & until something budges it I am no good.

HAZEL WASN’T PROUD OF CRYING. After the tunnel collapsed, she wept and screamed like a two-year-old throwing a tantrum. She couldn’t move the debris that separated her and Leo from the others. If the earth shifted any more, the entire complex might collapse on their heads. Still, she pounded her fists against the stones and yelled curses that would’ve earned her a mouth-washing with lye soap back at St. Agnes Academy. Leo stared at her, wide-eyed and speechless. She wasn’t being fair to him. The last time the two of them had been together, she’d zapped him into her past and shown him Sammy, his great-grandfather—Hazel’s first boyfriend. She’d burdened him with emotional baggage he didn’t need, and left him so dazed they had almost gotten killed by a giant shrimp monster. Now here they were, alone again, while their friends might be dying at the hands of a monster army, and she was throwing a fit. “Sorry.” She wiped her face. “Hey, you know…” Leo shrugged. “I’ve attacked a few rocks in my day.” She swallowed with difficulty. “Frank is…he’s—” “Listen,” Leo said. “Frank Zhang has moves. He’s probably gonna turn into a kangaroo and do some marsupial jujitsu on their ugly faces.” He helped her to her feet. Despite the panic simmering inside her, she knew Leo was right. Frank and the others weren’t helpless. They would find a way to survive. The best thing she and Leo could do was carry on. She studied Leo. His hair had grown out longer and shaggier, and his face was leaner, so he looked less like an imp and more like one of those willowy elves in the fairy tales. The biggest difference was his eyes. They constantly drifted, as if Leo was trying to spot something over the horizon. “Leo, I’m sorry,” she said. He raised an eyebrow. “Okay. For what?” “For…” She gestured around her helplessly. “Everything. For thinking you were Sammy, for leading you on. I mean, I didn’t mean to, but if I did—” “Hey.” He squeezed her hand, though Hazel sensed nothing romantic in the gesture. “Machines are designed to work.” “Uh, what?” “I figure the universe is basically like a machine. I don’t know who made it, if it was the Fates, or the gods, or capital-G God, or whatever. But it chugs along the way it’s supposed to most of the time. Sure, little pieces break and stuff goes haywire once in a while, but mostly…things happen for a reason. Like you and me meeting.” “Leo Valdez,” Hazel marveled, “you’re a philosopher.” “Nah,” he said. “I’m just a mechanic. But I figure my bisabuelo Sammy knew what was what. He let you go, Hazel. My job is to tell you that it’s okay. You and Frank—you’re good together. We’re all going to get through this. I hope you guys get a chance to be happy. Besides, Zhang couldn’t tie his shoes without your help.” “That’s mean,” Hazel chided, but she felt like something was untangling inside her—a knot of tension she’d been carrying for weeks. Leo really had changed. Hazel was starting to think she’d found a good friend. “What happened to you when you were on your own?” she asked. “Who did you meet?” Leo’s eye twitched. “Long story. I’ll tell you sometime, but I’m still waiting to see how it shakes out.” “The universe is a machine,” Hazel said, “so it’ll be fine.” “Hopefully.” “As long as it’s not one of your machines,” Hazel added. “Because your machines never do what they’re supposed to.” “Yeah, ha-ha.” Leo summoned fire into his hand. “Now, which way, Miss Underground?” Hazel scanned the path in front of them. About thirty feet down, the tunnel split into four smaller arteries, each one identical, but the one on the left radiated cold. “That way,” she decided. “It feels the most dangerous.” “I’m sold,” said Leo. They began their descent.

Her silence wasn’t simply distracted; there was something unnerving about it. He felt as if he stood on the prow of a ship, watching the captain scan the horizon for signs of impending disaster only the latter could recognize.

I stopped walking. I stood still in the middle of the track and I surveyed the landscape around me and I understood that the eyes which did this had lived a million times before. The way I scanned this horizon was the way the horizon had been scanned by my ancestors fifty thousand years ago as they walked the savannahs with spears between their toes. They had made me. I had learned it from them. Everything my body did the way I curled my fingers and bent my elbows the way I turned my head when I heard a sound. I had learned it from them and they had learned it from the apes before them and the apes had learned it from the fish and all of us had comes through this together. Everything led up to me and everything I was would lead beyond me there was this great chain and I was a link in it. The past and the future they were nothing they came together and parted again and everything was rising and falling and swirling around everything else.

So he raced from dogwood to blossoming peach. When they thinned out he headed for the cherry blossoms, then magnolia, chinaberry, pecan, walnut and prickly pear. At last he reached a field of apple trees whose flowers were just becoming tiny knots of fruit. Spring sauntered north, but he had to run like hell to keep it as his traveling companion. From February to July he was on the lookout for blossoms. When he lost them, and found himself without so much as a petal to guide him, he paused, climbed a tree on a hillock and scanned the horizon for a flash of pink or white in the leaf world that surrounded him. He did not touch them or stop to smell. He merely followed in their wake, a dark ragged figure guided by the blossoming plums.

Tendency to worry needlessly, endlessly; tendency to scan the horizon looking for something to worry about, alternating with inattention to or disregard for actual dangers. Worry becomes what attention turns into when it isn’t focused on some task.

After spending most of her life scanning the horizon for slights and threats, genuine and imagined, she knew the real threat to her happiness came not from the dot in the distance, but from looking for it. Expecting it. Waiting for it. And in some cases, creating it. Her

We might have a zillion reasons to be jaded about our world, but that is not the kind of person I want to be. I want to be someone who clings to the grace and the gift and the good. Rather than spend my days scanning the digital horizon for a dopamine hit of false comfort, I want to keep my ear tuned to the groanings of my place. I want to stand ready, as Christ’s ambassador in my neighborhood, wearing grace, flesh, and skinny jeans. I want to belong, just as I am, and I want to get better at loving people for every good and puzzling thing they are.

The individual, floating, but held on a leash like a dog, like an eye popping out of its socket, hanging on the end of its optic nerve, scanning the horizon through 180 degrees but not sending back any images—a disembodied panoptical terminal, runaway organ of a species of mutants.

Our natural tendency is to be distracted - to scan the horizon constantly for predators and prospects. Books made us turn that attention inward, to build higher and higher castles within the quiet kingdoms of our minds. Through that process of reflection and deep thinking, we evolved.

He scans the horizon from his arboreal vantage point, but he can’t see anything that looks like smoke. Arboreal, a fine word. Our arboreal ancestors, Crake used to say. Used to shit on their enemies from above while perched in trees. All planes and rockets and bombs are simply elaborations on that primate instinct.

I would advise you never to use the W-word today. The W-word is why. Sometimes there is no why, and if you get hung up on why, you lose your effectiveness. I’ve seen it happen. The men who die are the men who can’t believe they’re in a fight and can’t believe that someone is trying to kill them. It seems so unfair to them and they’re so busy feeling sorry for themselves, they don’t seek cover, they don’t return fire, they don’t scan the horizon, they forget how to use their expensive equipment. The men who live get it right away; they understand they’re in a different world and they have to deal with exactly what is before them with maximum concentration.

We get what we expect in life, as Norman Cousins pointed out, “The main trouble with despair is that it’s self-fulfilling. People who fear the worst tend to invite it. Heads that are down can’t scan the horizon for new openings. A burst of energy does not spring from a spirit of defeat. Ultimately, helplessness leads to hopelessness.

To Jesus she already is somebody. Like the loving father of the prodigal son, Jesus is frantically scanning the horizon, watching for Madonna to return to him. He's absolutely convinced that she's so valuable that she's worth dying for. 'Greater love has no one than this,' said Jesus in John 15:13, 'that one lay down his life for his friends.' That's what He did for her on the cross!

the numerous ways in which you can destroy love. You can fritter it away, through flirting and affairs. You can fail to pay it attention and watch it wither. You can poison it with arguments and bad blood. You can give up on it without even realising, preoccupied in your own corner. You can let it slip through your fingers as you scan the horizon, believing that there is someone, something better elsewhere.

I blinked and looked again—but it was still out there, a shiny chrome disc zigzagging around in the sky. My eyes struggled to track the object through a series of increasingly fast, impossibly sharp turns that would have juiced a human being, had there been any aboard. The disc streaked toward the distant horizon, then came to an instantaneous stop just above it. It hovered there motionless over the distant tree line for a few seconds, as if scanning

The Jealous Sun The sunlight whispers in my ear, his breath a warm, sultry tease. I shrink and duck beneath a tree. My eyes squint to scan the horizon for a glimpse of the wind, but there are no ashen ribbons or golden waves in sight. He is missing. Trickling, tinkling notes reflect loudly off a chandelier of glimmering droplets. The rain sings to me, and I shield my eyes, admiring the song. Far off in my western view I expect to see snow, but the sun grows hot with jealousy, knowing this. He refuses my snowman a place to set. My sight drops to search for the man in the moon. Normally he rises dripping wet from out of the lake, often pale and naked, supple and soft to my caressing gaze. On rare occasions he dons a pumpkin robe as luminous as fire. Today he is draped in silks of the saddest blue. My heart weeps as he steals up and away. An army of stars in shining armor come to my aid, and they force the sun into the ground—a temporary grave. I am fed with a billion bubbles of laughter until I feel I will burst. But the stars will not stop giving, and I will not stop taking. A kiss brands my cheek, and I turn abruptly to find my snowman. He landed safely in the dark. We hide from the man in the moon behind a curtain of flurries to dance on polished rainbows and feast on stars until I hear a fire-red growl. The sun claws its way out of the soil, and everyone scatters.

And all the time, deep within her, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a shipwrecked sailor she scanned her solitude with desperate eyes for the sight of a white sail far off on the misty horizon. She had no idea what that chance would be, what wind would waft it to her, where it would set her ashore, whether it was a launch or a three-decker, laden with anguish or filled to the portholes with happiness. But every morning when she woke she hoped to find it there.

While you were looking outward, scanning the horizon for threats,” he continued, “you missed what was happening in your own backyard. What was taking root right here, on American soil. In your towns, your shops, in your heartland. Among your friends, in your families. The sensible conservatives moving to the right. The right moving far right. The far right becoming alt-right. Becoming, in their rage and frustration, radicalized thanks to an internet filled with crazy theories, false ‘facts,’ and smug politicians allowed to spew lies.

What a nice thing to say," Mom said, standing up a little straighter, as if she'd been watered. Marlena's manners were unpracticed, but she was what Dad would call winning. She was abrupt in a way that I always associate with rude people, but bestowed a kind of brightness on whatever caught her interest---if it happened to be you, nothing felt more sublime. Though when the beam of her attention drifted away, a searchlight scanning the next bit of horizon, it stung. She would have done well in New York, where so many people cultivate that air of intensity cut with indifference.

All their men—brothers, uncles, fathers, husbands, sons—had been picked off one by one by one. They had a single piece of paper directing them to a preacher on DeVore Street. The War had been over four or five years then, but nobody white or black seemed to know it. Odd clusters and strays of Negroes wandered the back roads and cowpaths from Schenectady to Jackson. Dazed but insistent, they searched each other out for word of a cousin, an aunt, a friend who once said, “Call on me. Anytime you get near Chicago, just call on me.” Some of them were running from family that could not support them, some to family; some were running from dead crops, dead kin, life threats, and took-over land. Boys younger than Buglar and Howard; configurations and blends of families of women and children, while elsewhere, solitary, hunted and hunting for, were men, men, men. Forbidden public transportation, chased by debt and filthy “talking sheets,” they followed secondary routes, scanned the horizon for signs and counted heavily on each other. Silent, except for social courtesies, when they met one another they neither described nor asked about the sorrow that drove them from one place to another. The whites didn’t bear speaking on. Everybody knew.

Is your heart fixed today to recognize the presence of God? To see His fingerprints and hear His voice? The events that others call coincidence, will you recognize them as sovereign providence? Ask the Lord to sharpen your spiritual senses so that you catch a glimpse of His glory. Focus your expectation. Lean forward or on tiptoe. Resist the inclination to be so caught up in the temporal that you miss seeing the eternal. Scan the horizon for where His voice is calling out to you or where His fingerprints are working on your behalf. Be alert. Be present. Be fully engaged in the day stretched out before you. He’ll be there. Waiting to be seen by anyone watching and waiting.

Seven men inhabit the raft. The pessimist, for whom the good things of life are no more than lures to prolong suffering; the egocentric, whose motto is 'Carpe diem' - enjoy today - and who does his best to get the most comfortable part of the raft himself; the optimist, always scanning the horizon for the promised land; the observer, who finds it enough to write the logbook of the voyage and to note down the behaviour of the sea, the raft and his fellow-victims; the altruist, who finds his reason for being in the need to deny himself and to help others; the stoic, who believes in nothing but his own refusal to jump overboard and end it all; and finally the child, the one born, as some with perfect pitch, with perfect ignorance - the pityfully ubiquitous child, who believes that all will be explained in the end, the nightmare fade and the green shore rise.

Third Mate to Second Mate, Third Mate to Second Mate, over. My friend, I know you’re out there and you mustn’t despair. Sleep during the day, At night your thoughts will come clear. We have looked at the stars together—chart them each night. If they are in the right places, you’re doing fine. Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past. Do not try to picture people’s faces—you will despair if they don’t come clear. If you are visited by people from far away, don’t think of them as ghosts. Treat them as family, ask them questions, be a good host. You will need a purpose, The Captain’s purpose was to get us home safe. Your purpose will be to stay strong so that you can rescue the girl who rows in the dark. She is in trouble and needs help. You’re the only one out there who can help her. Scan the horizons at night, look for lights and flares. You must save her for me. I’m sorry that I let you down. It was my job to look out for you. I was supposed to save you, and I failed. You were the real hero. When the Americans came, you saved us all, and when you needed us, we weren’t there for you. Somehow, one day, I’ll make things right.

What are you doing abovedecks, anyhow?” “The cry went up for all hands.” “You’re not a hand. You’re a passenger.” “I may not be a hand, but I’ve got two perfectly good hands, and if I sit on them a second longer, I’ll go mad.” Joss stared at Gray’s open collar, where his cravat should have been knotted. “She’s really getting to you, isn’t she?” “You have no idea,” Gray muttered. “Oh, I think I do.” Gray ignored his brother’s smug tone. “Damn it, Joss, just put me to work. Send me up to furl a sail, put me down in the hold to pump the bilge…I don’t care, just give me something to do.” Joss raised his eyebrows. “If you insist.” He lifted the spyglass to his eye and began scanning the horizon again. “Batten the hatches, then.” Gray tossed a word of thanks over his shoulder as he descended to the quarterdeck and went to work, dragging the tarpaulins over the skylights and securing them with battens. As he labored, the ship’s motions grew more violent, hampering his efforts. He saved the vent above the ladies’ cabin for last, resisting the urge to peer down through the grate. Instead, he first secured one end, then blanketed the entire skylight with one strong snap on the canvas. “Ahoy! Ahoy!” Wiggins leaned forward over the prow, hailing the approaching ship, its puffed scudding sails a stark contrast against the darkening sky. Gray moved to cover the companion stairs, reaching inside the gaping black hole and groping for the handle to draw the hatch closed. Something-or someone-groped him back.

The girl circled in my arm was clean and fresh, and her sleeping breath was humid against the base of my throat. Something stirred in me in response to her helplessness, and yet at the same time I resented her. I had seen too damn many of these brisk and shining girls, so lovely, so gracious, and so inflexibly ambitious. They had counted their stock in trade and burnished it and spread it right out there on the counter. It was all yours for the asking. All you had to do was give her all the rest of your life, and come through with the backyard pool, cookouts, Eames chairs, mortgage, picture windows, two cars, and all the rest of the setting they required for themselves. These gorgeous girls, with steel behind their eyes, were the highest paid whores in the history of the world. All they offered was their poised, half-educated selves, one hundred and twenty pounds of healthy, unblemished, arrogant meat, in return for the eventual occupational ulcer, the suburban coronary. Nor did they bother to sweeten the bargain with their virginity. Before you could, in your hypnoid state, slip the ring on her imperious finger, that old-fashioned prize was long gone, and even its departure celebrated many times, on house parties and ski weekends, in becalmed sailboats and on cruise ships. This acknowledged and excused promiscuity was, in fact, to her advantage. Having learned her way through the jungly province of sex, she was less likely to be bedazzled by body hunger to the extent that she might make a bad match with an unpromising young man. Her decks were efficiently cleared, guns rolled out, fuses alight, cannonballs stacked, all sails set. She stood on the bridge, braced and ready, scanning the horizon with eyes as cold as winter pebbles. One

Gray froze as Miss Turner emerged from the hold. For weeks, she’d plagued him-by day, he suffered glimpses of her beauty; by night, he was haunted by memories of her touch. And just when he thought he’d finally wrangled his desire into submission, today she’d ruined everything. She’d gone and changed her dress. Gone was that serge shroud, that forbidding thundercloud of a garment that had loomed in his peripheral vision for weeks. Today, she wore a cap-sleeved frock of sprigged muslin. She stepped onto the deck, smiling face tilted to the wind. A flower opening to greet the sun. She bobbed on her toes, as though resisting the urge to make a girlish twirl. The pale, sheer fabric of her dress billowed and swelled in the breeze, pulling the undulating contour of calf, thigh, hip into relief. Gray thought she just might be the loveliest creature he’d ever seen. Therefore, he knew he ought to look away. He did, for a moment. He made an honest attempt to scan the horizon for clouds. He checked the hour on his pocket watch, wound the small knob one, two, three, four times. He wiped a bit of salt spray from its glass face. He thought of England. And France, and Cuba, and Spain. He remembered his brother, his sister, and his singularly ugly Aunt Rosamond, on whom he hadn’t clapped eyes in decades. And all this Herculean effort resulting in nothing but a fine sheen of sweat on his brow and precisely thirty seconds’ delay in the inevitable. He looked at her again. Desire swept through his body with starling intensity. And beneath that hot surge of lust, a deeper emotion swelled. It wasn’t something Gray wished to examine. He preferred to let it sink back into the murky depths of his being. An unnamed creature of the deep, let for a more intrepid adventurer to catalog. Instead, he examined Miss Turner’s new frock. The fabric was of fine quality, the sprig pattern evenly stamped, without variations in shape or hue. The dressmaker had taken great pains to match the pattern at the seams. The sleeves of the frock fit perfectly square with her shoulders, in a moment of calm, the skirt’s single flounce lapped the laces of her boots. Unlike that gray serge abomination, this dress was expensive, and it had been fashioned for her alone. But it no longer fit. As she turned, Gray noted how the neckline gaped slightly, and the column of her skirt that ought to have skimmed the swell of her hip instead caught on nothing but air. He frowned. And in that instant, she turned to face him. Their gazes caught and held. Her own smile faded to a quizzical expression. And because Gray didn’t know how to answer the unspoken question in her eyes, and because he hated the fact that he’d banished the giddy delight from her face, he gave her a curt nod and a churlish, “Good morning.” And then he walked away.

MY DAILY WALK There is no medicine like hope—the expectation that tomorrow will be better than today. And for the Christian, that hope is no idle dream. Your future can brim with expectation because of Jesus’ promise, “I will come and get you” (John 14:3). But in the meantime, you need the daily reminder and encouragement that your waiting is not in vain. In Jesus’ response to his disciples’ questions, he offers several principles to help them—and you—pass the time until his return:     1. Don’t get sidetracked (Matthew 24:4). False christs will abound, but there will be no doubt when Jesus returns (24:24-31).     2. Don’t become a date-setter (24:36). Only the Father knows when that great event will happen.     3. Be a wise steward of your time and opportunities (24:14, 45-46). God wants you to plant seed, not scan the horizon.     On your appointment calendar, pick a date later this month and add this memo: “It’s later than it’s ever been before. Am I more prepared than I’ve ever been before?” THERE IS NO TRIAL SO BIG THAT IT CANNOT BE CONQUERED BY CHRISTIAN HOPE.

It’s no coincidence that being watchful and prayerful are coupled by the apostle Paul in his letter to the Colossians: “Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful.” The word watchful is a throwback to the ancient watchmen whose job it was to sit on the city walls and scan the horizon for attacking armies or trading caravans. They saw sooner and further than anyone else. Prayer opens our spiritual eyes so we see sooner and further.

By accident, the bound codex taught us sustained focus, abstract thinking, logic. Our natural tendency is to be distracted—to scan the horizon constantly for predators and prospects. Books made us turn that attention inward, to build higher and higher castles within the quiet kingdoms of our minds. Through that process of reflection and deep thinking, we evolved.

Like boats, we human beings need anchors, no matter how tenuously those links may hold us, or else we drift forever through uncharted oceans, scanning every horizon for a hint of hope. And with the chances of being picked up and rescued so small, we need our islands, our mooring points, our ports, our points of reference and our havens.

There you go. Happiness approaches. Happy is a name-well, the English version, anyway." He stood and scanned the horizon. His eyes fixed on something in the distance. A grin spread across his face. "Yep. Apollo, your escort is on the way." I followed his gaze. Spiraling down from the clouds was a large winged creature that glinted of Celestial bronze. On its back were two human-size figures. Their descent was silent, but in my mind a joyous fanfare of Valdezinator music proclaimed the good news. Leo had returned

Ironically, during that time, Charles and Diana enjoyed the happiest period of their married life. The balmy summer months before Harry’s birth was a time of contentment and mutual devotion. But a storm cloud hovered on the horizon. Diana knew that Charles was desperate for their second child to be a girl. A scan had already shown that her baby was a boy. It was a secret she nursed until the moment he was born at 4.20pm on Saturday, September 15 in the Lindo wing at St. Mary’s Hospital. Charles’s reaction finally closed the door on any love Diana may have felt for him. “Oh it’s a boy,” he said, “and he’s even got rusty hair.” [A common Spencer trait.] With these dismissive remarks he left to play polo. From that moment, as Diana has told friends: “Something inside me died.” It was a reaction which marked the beginning of the end of their marriage.

Making ourselves feel solid, permanent, separate, continuous and defined – by constantly scanning the phenomenal horizon for reference points which substantiate these criteria – is a convoluted process. The phenomena of our perception will only serve us temporarily in this capacity. So if we take this course, we sentence ourselves to the continuous activity of establishing and replacing reference points. When we engage in this process, we convert our perceptual circumstances into a prison. In fact, our perceptual circumstances not only become an incarceration, but a very subtle personal torture chamber. We need to be continually on the look-out for new reference points. We need to reassess old reference points. We need to imbue ourselves with a certain pervasive nervousness. We need to foster a sense of unease about the whole process of experiencing existence. It could become unrelenting hard work in our own personal forced labour camp. In our attempts to establish reference points we react to the phenomena of our perception in three ways. We are either attracted, we are averse or we are indifferent. Attraction, aversion and indifference are usually referred to, in the translations of Buddhist texts, as lust (desire or attachment); hatred (anger or aggression); and ignorance. Although these words have a distinct application to the three distorted tendencies (usually referred to as ‘the Three Poisons’), they have connotations in English that lend them the tone of ‘the Seven Deadly Sins’. If we encounter anything that seems to substantiate our fictions of solidity, permanence, separateness, continuity, and definition – we are attracted, we reach out for it. If we encounter anything that threatens these fictions – we are averse, we push it away. If we encounter anything that neither substantiates nor threatens these fictions – we are indifferent. What we cannot manipulate, we ignore. But what is left of our responses if these three fictions dissolve? The question of what our experience would be like without attraction, aversion, and indifference poses an interesting challenge to our rationale. In fact, we cannot approach this question at all, if we approach it through conventional reasoning. Fundamentally this question deals with the nature of experience itself. If attraction, aversion, and indifference dissolve, what remains is not any ‘kind of experience’; it is simply experience – experience as such. In terms of experience as such; we are completely present, open, and free in the experience of whatever arises as a perception. Dechen, Khandro; Chogyam, Ngakpa (2014-01-14). Spectrum of Ecstasy: Embracing the Five Wisdom Emotions of Vajrayana Buddhism (p. 45). Shambhala Publications. Kindle Edition.

When you find yourself anxiously scanning the horizon of your life, use that as a reminder to seek My Face. You will not find Me off in the distance—I am here beside you, nearer than you dare believe.

Over the past few millennia, we’ve co-opted brain circuits already in use to scan the world for food or danger, in a sense fooling ourselves into paying attention to the inert little symbols on the page. Brain scans have shown that areas once used exclusively for scanning the horizon—for recognizing animal tracks, ripe berries, and snakes in trees—became the region that allowed us to quickly recognize letters and words. We’ve trained our brain to read by modifying the structures we once used to sense danger and movement and odd shapes in the grass. Dehaene and other researchers have found that most of our letter shapes are actually transpositions of key shapes from nature to which we’ve learned pay attention: a “Y” resembles the crook of tree branches, a “T” (on its side) the shape formed whenever one object masks another—imagine a telephone pole breaking the line of the horizon. “T-detector” neurons help us determine which object is in front, Dehaene wrote. “We did not invent most of our letter shapes: they lay dormant in our brain for millions of years, and were merely rediscovered when our species invented writing and the alphabet.

Survival is tunnel vision. Growth is scanning the horizon.

n the treetops, this powerful vision was built for speed—seeing and reacting quickly. On the open grassland, it was the opposite. Safety and finding food relied upon slow, patient observation of the environment, on the ability to pick out details and focus on what they might mean. Our ancestors’ survival depended on the intensity of their attention. The longer and harder they looked, the more they could distinguish between an opportunity and a danger. If they simply scanned the horizon quickly they could see a lot more, but this would overload the mind with information—too many details for such sharp vision. The human visual system is not built for scanning, as a cow’s is, but for depth of focus.

When we know we are energy beings, we begin to live away from the fear-based stories our minds create and start living from the other option that is available to us—the perspective of our true, eternal nature as the Soulful Self. Rather than focusing externally, always scanning the horizon for what may do us harm, we focus inward on the energy within and around our body and rely on it to show us what is true for us. When we do this, life flows effortlessly. Opportunities for love and expansion are revealed naturally; we only have to lean in, say yes, and let them unfold. We are powerfully loving, and lovingly powerful. We know and feel our oneness with everything and feel separate from nothing. Stress and worry don’t exist, because we know, unequivocally, that everything in our life ultimately serves our expansion and well-being.

In the imagination of two late-twentieth-century filmmakers, an unseen force of artificial intelligence has overtaken the human species, has managed to control humans in an alternate reality in which everything one sees, feels, hears, tastes, smells, touches is in actuality a program. There are programs within programs, and humans become not just programmed but are in danger of and, in fact, well on their way to becoming nothing more than programs. What is reality and what is a program morph into one. The interlocking program passes for life itself. The great quest in the film series The Matrix involves those humans who awaken to this realization as they search for a way to escape their entrapment. Those who accept their programming get to lead deadened, surface lives enslaved to a semblance of reality. They are captives, safe on the surface, as long as they are unaware of their captivity. Perhaps it is the unthinking acquiescence, the blindness to one’s imprisonment, that is the most effective way for human beings to remain captive. People who do not know that they are captive will not resist their bondage. But those who awaken to their captivity threaten the hum of the matrix. Any attempt to escape their imprisonment risks detection, signals a breach in the order, exposes the artifice of unreality that has been imposed upon human beings. The Matrix, the unseen master program fed by the survival instinct of an automated collective, does not react well to threats to its existence. In a crucial moment, a man who has only recently awakened to the program in which he and his species are ensnared consults a wise woman, the Oracle, who, it appears, could guide him. He is uncertain and wary, as he takes a seat next to her on a park bench that may or may not be real. She speaks in code and metaphor. A flock of birds alights on the pavement beyond them. “See those birds,” the Oracle says to him. “At some point a program was written to govern them.” She looks up and scans the horizon. “A program was written to watch over the trees and the wind, the sunrise and sunset. There are programs running all over the place.” Some of these programs go without notice, so perfectly attuned they are to their task, so deeply embedded in the drone of existence. “The ones doing their job,” she tells him, “doing what they were meant to do are invisible. You’d never even know they were here.” So, too, with the caste system as it goes about its work in silence, the string of a puppet master unseen by those whose subconscious it directs, its instructions an intravenous drip to the mind, caste in the guise of normalcy, injustice looking just, atrocities looking unavoidable to keep the machinery humming, the matrix of caste as a facsimile for life itself and whose purpose is maintaining the primacy of those hoarding and holding tight to power.

An officer who testified that he had served in naval intelligence was convicted of perjury, on the grounds that no such thing had ever existed. Rookie pilots were required to spend the day in fur-lined winter flight suits with helmets and gloves, scanning the horizon for icebergs using “binoculars” fashioned from a pair of Coke bottles.

While you were looking outward, scanning the horizon for threats,” he continued, “you missed what was happening in your own backyard. What was taking root right here, on American soil. In your towns, your shops, in your heartland. Among your friends, in your families. The sensible conservatives moving to the right. The right moving far right. The far right becoming

The overwhelming influence of technology in our lives prods us to scan the horizon for approaching events, evaluate their respective worth and prioritize them based on some cost/benefit model. Pragmatism has become the culture’s sadistic and malevolent god, and he demands ever-increasing allegiance and worship.

When you look around and can’t find any version of yourself out there in the wider world, when you scan the horizon and see nobody like you, you start to feel a broader loneliness, a sense of being mismatched to your own hopes, your own plans, your own strengths. You begin to wonder

In life, it’s hard to dream about what’s not visible. When you look around and can’t find any version of yourself out there in the wider world, when you scan the horizon and see nobody like you, you start to feel a broader sense of loneliness, a sense of being mismatched to your own hopes, your own plans, your own strengths. You begin to wonder where- and how- you will even belong.

To pay attention in normal ways, you need to feel safe. You need to be able to switch off the parts of your mind that are scanning the horizon for bears or lions or their modern equivalents, and let yourself sink down into one secure topic.

The long view of motherhood sees far beyond the third trimester, potty training, and even high school graduation. The long view of motherhood scans the horizon of eternity. We understand that our child may one day be our brother or sister in Christ. We mothers always need to have the long view of life in our minds as we go about our days. God is about his work of creating people who are created and recreated in the image of his Son. We are part of the new humanity, a people whose pattern of life is being transformed by God so that we no longer walk in ways that enslave us in death and futility. The world will one day be filled with the glory of the Lord the way the waters cover the sea! In all our mothering, we look toward that day.

I started to suspect that the real reason we can't agree on a formula for elite team leadership is that we've overcomplicated things. We've been so busy scanning the horizon for transformational knights in shining armor that we've ignored the likelier truth: there are hundreds upon thousands of potentially transformative leaders right in our midst. We just lack the ability to recognize them.

Ecosystems require organizations that are constantly on the lookout for new possibilities, constantly scanning the horizon for new opportunities to make cross-sectoral plays and forge cooperative partnerships with others. Organizations can only be open to those possibilities and opportunities when their employees are curious and open minded. And employees are most likely to be curious and open minded when their leaders are holistically looking out for their best interests and actively searching for ways to provide them with everything they need. This is clearly most relevant to those within the senior ranks of your organization, but it really applies to everyone who serves in key roles. Above all, servant leadership helps organizations adopt all of the ideals that the ecosystem economy demands: openness, entrepreneurialism, decisiveness, a fail-fast mindset, long-term thinking, and more.

She shifted her seat and shoved the thought aside. After spending most of her life scanning the horizon for slights and threats, genuine and imagined, she knew the real threat to her happiness came not from the dot in the distance, but from looking for it. Expecting it. Waiting for it. And in some cases, creating it. Her father had jokingly accused her of living in the wreckage of her future. Until one day she’d looked deep into his eyes and saw he wasn’t joking.

It’s well documented that our brains are programmed to scan the horizon for threats.

First, you must break the habit of searching for your “true” soul mate. This habit is so deeply ingrained that even after we are married we continue scanning the horizon in case the person we were really meant to be with should suddenly appear. And if they do appear, and you lock eyes and recognize each other, then you will risk everything, including your marriage and family, to join them in a journey into a nightmarish realm. This person is often someone you tortured in a former lifetime and you are irresistibly attracted to in order to repair, heal, and mend from these misadventures. When you meet them again in this life, you feel as if you have known each other forever (you have), that you have been waiting for them your entire life (you have), and that you have finally found someone you can be happy with (how wrong!). I am convinced that this is why monks and nuns take a vow of celibacy—they are choosing to stop learning and growing along the hazardous path of the kind of love that you fall into or out of. Meanwhile the rest of us continue searching for the mate who is our perfect fit, our twin flame who totally gets who we are, who knows us better than we know ourselves. The Laika believe that we reincarnate to learn specific lessons and to be of service. We are irresistibly attracted to people we failed to learn a lesson with in the past.

Maybe running away wasn't such a good idea," I said, scanning the lifeless town. The sun crawled over the horizon, casting long shadows like bony fingers reaching down to clutch the empty streets.

Neurotic guilt scans the horizons of the past relentlessly seeking out the most deplorable, hideous, and culpable acts which are least consistent with one's self image. This process is similar to the infinite passion of intensified anxiety for seeking the worst conceivable possibilities in order to alert the whole organism to potential danger.

Freedom found me the day I realized I was not bound to witchcraft. The FATHER was waiting, He was scanning the horizon for the day I would realize I could come home. And He ran to welcome me into His loving arms.

He didn't look away. No one looked at a person that way anymore. They checked their phones, or scanned the horizon, or glanced around.

Remember to look up from the dirt occasionally and scan the horizon.

Remember to look up from the dirt once in a while and scan the horizon.

...the Father has yet to leave His post. His eyes still scan the horizon. And no darkness, no matter how dark, can hide the prodigal. Job said it this way: 'For He [the Father] looks to the ends of the earth, and sees under the whole heavens.

Being alert is not to vigilantly stand on tip-toe in order to scan some distant horizon out of the fear of some approaching enemy. Quite the opposite. It is falling to our knees knowing that God is already out on that horizon and that He thwarted the enemy long before they ever reached it.

She believed she had uncovered a key truth about focus: To pay attention in normal ways, you need to feel safe. You need to be able to switch off the parts of your mind that are scanning the horizon for bears or lions or their modern equivalents, and let yourself sink down into one secure topic.

The sun is just setting on all the slate rooftops. I scan the endless horizon, and Louis must guess what I'm looking for, because he pulls on my hand and silently points toward the right, in the direction of the Eiffel Tower, which is just visible in the distance. "Is this for real?" I ask Louis stands behind me and wraps his arms around my waist as we keep admiring the view. "I hope so," he whispers in my ear.