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Driving down a highway in West Texas with a train running parallel in the distance Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Copy article link Save For nearly 17 years, my family and I lived in one of the strangest houses around. It had quirks aplenty, but what it had going for it was the bulk of the back wall of the home was glass. The expansive windows looked out over an even more expansive view of a river.
In the weeks after we moved to the house in 2005, my husband fell and got a minor fracture on his knee — which led, unbeknown to us, to a giant blood clot that broke away from his leg and ended up stuck saddling his lungs. Once at the hospital, the doctor explained to me that my husband's prognosis was grim. "I don't expect him to make it through the night," the doctor told me in the emergency room on that Sunday night.
Looking over a Mississippi River sunset in downtown Baton Rouge At the time, our daughters were 8 and 3. My husband made it through the night, but during the next week, each day, one by one, his organs started shutting down. On the Friday of that fateful week, the doctor told me that I should bring our daughters in to see their dad.
I understood what that meant. Miraculously, on the next day, my husband started improving. He ended up staying in the hospital for 31 days — and nearly 20 years later, he is still going strong.
From where I sit now, I sometimes think about those days in the fall of 2005 when I didn't know what was going to happen or how my life was going to go. The hospital strictly enforced visiting hours, which meant I spent time each day at our new home. Even back then, I recognized that I had an unexpected peace about things.
For one thing, I could genuinely feel the prayers of people who loved us. The other thing that helped me more than made sense was the view our home afforded of the river. Day after day, quietly sitting there and staring at the ever-running water helped settle my mind in ways I can't explain.
The panoramic view never got old. I would sometimes sit there and think, "Why does looking at this feel so good?" In the desert of south Utah A few weeks ago, a friend sent a link to Tim Ferriss' podcast interview with the English/Irish poet David Whyte . In the interview Whyte talks a lot about horizons and the value of looking at and beyond them, both literally and metaphorically.
His erudite words and perspective inspired me to do more research on horizons and why we like looking at them. I mean, we are always looking at something. Why are some views of nature so much more pleasing than others? Sensory Trust , a U.
K.-based charity, published an article on horizon-gazing, saying, "Our ancestors would have gazed at the horizon and widened their peripheral vision as much as possible in order to scan the landscape for threats. This act produces a calming effect, safe in the knowledge that no immediate action needs to be taken.
" Sensory Trust then asks the question: How does horizon-gazing fit in with the modern world and can it really have an impact on our emotional health and wellbeing? Dr. Andrew Huberman 's studies provide some science to explain the positive effects of looking at a broad horizon, saying that when we look at something stressful our field of vision narrows to keep that one thing is in sharp focus and the rest blurrier. Zion National Park in Utah Huberman is a professor of neuroscience and ophthalmology at Stanford.
His research suggests that by expanding one's visual field, the body is able to switch off the stress response — a wider panorama or view reduces stress. (He has lots of videos that explain ways to reduce stress with visual and breathing techniques.) All these years later, I better understand why, when I was in the most stressful period of my life, I craved sitting and looking out the window at the broad view of a river flowing.
I don't live in the same house any more. The view out my back window is not impressive. Even still, I'm a believer in finding ways to regularly broaden my horizon — both literally and figuratively.
I make a point to find the horizon and sit and stare almost daily, near and far — whether it's out my window in my office, of the Mississippi River, while driving down a road in West Texas, at the Grand Canyon, Zion National Park or walking around University Lake in Baton Rouge. The start of a new year is a good time to do just that..
