For years I wanted to coin a quotable phrase of philosophical insight; the kind of phrase like Murphy’s Law, “If anything can go wrong, it will”,  or “Don’t put off tomorrow what you can do today”, or even “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’. I wanted to have my name attached to some memorable quote that would be known perhaps as Handley’s axiom. I pondered on this for months with no satisfying results. As hard as I might try, I couldn’t formulate an original phrase. And then one day right out of the blue, there it was, the result of an extremely trying situation, which had engulfed me. I was under tremendous pressure at work. I was feeling stress at home because of work. Nothing seemed to be going right and I felt I was sinking. The pressure was so intense in fact that it impaired my vision of seeing the end to my problem. I was not able to make an offensive plan because of my defensive position. My outlook was grim because my perspective was shallow. I couldn’t “see the forest for the trees”, and there was “no light at the end of the tunnel”. And that is when the words fell- “When your eye is at the water line, your horizon is not very far off” - what an odd quirky thought. I kind of liked it, and even though I was still stressed and “going under for the third time”, I had to take a few moments and think- when your eye is at the water line, your horizon is not very far off. I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself because I knew I had it. I remember at the time that it didn’t really help me out of my then current situation, but it did bring me some degree of satisfaction knowing that I finally had the long sought quotable quote. So, what was I thinking and feeling at the time, how have I developed this thought? Honestly, it did nothing for me at the time except create an image of myself bobbing in the water, head half submerged in a great pool of stress and self-pity. I wrote the thought on a sticky note on my computer screen at work and there it sat for many years. Most of the time I don’t see it because I am used to it being there. But every once in a while, I will clear off my workspace or rearrange my desktop and there I find it and I remind myself, I really ought to figure out what it means.

How does one establish a horizon line? Once in an art class I learned that the level of the viewer’s eye determines the horizon. In other words, if I am six feet tall, the horizon I look at on a flat plane is about six feet high.  My grandson Gunnar, on the other hand is only about three and a half feet tall- his horizon is about three and a half feet high. How can I change my horizon, to increase my perspective? I can climb a ladder, go up a mountain, or fly in an airplane. From the top of Mt. Timpanogos, I can see from the Salt Lake Valley over to the Uinta’s, down south to Mt. Nebo and over to West Mountain and beyond. By physically raising the level of my eye, I am able to increase my perspective. What is the opposite of this perspective? What is the lowest level I can place my eye and diminish my perspective? I guess it would be to place my eyeball on the ground- not a very easy or comfortable thing to do. That is where I developed a more plausible method to diminish that perspective, by placing myself in the water and sinking my eye down to waterline.

As with each of us there is a physical body with physical parts and physical limitations, so there is also a spiritual body with spiritual and emotional capabilities.  The perspective I enjoy at my six-foot physical stature may not represent my spiritual perspective at any given time. Indeed, as I get older my kids constantly remind me that I’m shrinking. My boys tell me my spine is collapsing, that I am “over the hill” and on my way down the other side. As my perspective may diminish in one way, I have long felt that it is growing in another. The challenges I face in life, including those my children give me, provide an ever-increasing perspective of the landscape of life and my purpose here. Perhaps my spiritual perspective is ten feet high, or maybe even thirty feet, or even a hundred. How would one quantify a spiritual and emotional perspective?

As I stood on the shore of the Great Salt Lake Friday near the Bonneville Salt Flats, thoughts of my physical and spiritual perspectives came flooding back to me. Here I was on the edge of a vast sea of water with a distinct horizon in the distance. How could I use my camera to capture the feeling of my eye at the waterline? Try as I might, I couldn’t achieve the perspective I was after without placing my camera physically in the water. I knew the ice-cold briny saltwater of the Great Salt Lake would be devastatingly corrosive to my camera body. The only way to truly capture the idea of sinking would be to half submerge my camera below the surface of the water. I’ll have to return someday with a sealed underwater housing to truly see what that would appear as. In the meantime, I’ll always know what I felt emotionally when my perspective has left me bobbing for the vista when my eye was at the waterline and my horizon not very far off.