Meeting An Horizon

If you set to embark on the journey to reach the horizon where the sky and the earth meet, I bet you will get to the horizon where the poor and the rich meet on that same route.

There is an attitude that drives a determined person when he can’t imagine and don’t care what it will cost him to get to the end of what he has chosen to do. Just like he sees the natural horizon, he sees where he is going and do not care how long or how difficult it will be to get there--- it is like journeying to the horizon. This attitude brings you to reach many other horizons, among them is the one where the poor and the rich meet.

To many people, it is “the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer”; a statement that seems to tell you there is continuous widening gap between the two but the truth is, the former keeps himself moving while the latter gets himself stuck.

In the book, gifted hands, Sonya (Ben Carson’s mother) reached the horizon between the poor and the rich in books. Even though she couldn’t read, she watched her masters, saw how they relate with books (housing, cleaning and handling books carefully) and believed that it is the horizon where the poor and the rich meet. She showed her children the route and made sure they came in contact with the horizon. Remember she had a choice of getting herself stuck in her illiteracy but she decided to move instead.

Richard Wright in his book “the black boy” got himself to the horizon in books too. Unlike his folks in the hood, he decided not to get himself stuck in the ghetto where it is believed the blacks are damned, instead, he moved until he could see a horizon between black Americans and the Whites and where his rights lies in the pages of books.

In the movie 'Pursuit of Happiness' Chris Gardner (WillSmith) started his ‘journey to the horizon’ by investing his entire life savings in portable bone-density scanners which he tries to demonstrate and sell to doctors but turned out to be a failure. He kept on with trying to market the scanners until he met a horizon in a Rubik’s cube during a short cab ride where he met Jay Twistle (Brian Howe) through whom he had a chance to become an intern stockbroker.

He got to another horizon when as an intern stockbroker; he developed a way to make phone sales calls more efficiently to potential high value customers, defying protocols in the process. He even went to an extent of lending a five dollar cab fee he couldn’t afford to one of his bosses all in the name of reaching a horizon. After his internship, his journey has paid off and he is offered the position from where he later became a multi-millionaire.

The poor have a lot of reasons to get him stuck and he identifies with most of these reasons, that is the main reason he remains poor; the rich also have reasons to get stuck but he rarely sees those reasons and that is why he becomes even richer. Everyone has a choice; a choice to or not to identify with the situation around you is one; A choice to or not to journey towards the horizon.