Newport Navalog

Harlan: Find Your Horizon

Airline pilots who fly by night have a little grimmer look about their eyes and mouth when they come up on the flight deck and find there is no horizon for the night's operations. It's dangerous out there flying holes into dark nothingness when weather conditions have obscured the line of demarcation between sea and sky. It ups the percentage of chance a bit that several million dollars of plane and a priceless pilot's life may be wasted before the night is out, for lack of the visual guidance a firm horizon can give.

A visit to a prison like Sing Sing, "the Big House" on the Hudson, is always depressing, not so much for its gray forbidding walls and dismal atmosphere as for its evidence of tragic waste of wonderful manhood. You see column after column of tall straight powerfully built men quickstepping back to their cells, a giant prisoner in the lead calling cadence and your heart cries out "What a waste!" Somewhere each of these men great in his potential failed or was failed in the delineation of the normal horizon of reality by which men are created to live the morals the laws the weals of God's human society. Given that horizon what might they each not have become? Without that horizon this waste.

Even among the rest of us however, who by the grace of God and good family training live out our lives away from brigs and prisons there usually is a good percentage of proportional waste. A man's mind and the expanse of his horizon can quickly be evaluated by his talk and interests. The lad who naively tries to conceal his inferiorities by loud repetitions of the same simple obscene words sprinkled through his barrack talk, and the lad whose literary enjoyment as a result of all his opportunities in American education is limited to the pictures of a pin-up magazine we have these boys around us always to bless their pointed little heads but what a waste our horizons grow dim and narrow unless we have the energy to keep pushing out and expanding them.

The opportunities God gives us carry a corresponding obligation that we exert ourselves to take advantage of them. It can be asserted with a background of clinical research behind the statement that two of us no matter what our status and education will develop more than 50% of the abilities that God put into us when He made us as individuals.