If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange, we always have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then we both have two ideas.
George Bernard Shaw
MAYO, A FUTURE OF OPPORTUNITIES
Try to think of how many times a day you stop to look at the horizon. If you live in a seaside town, you will probably have many opportunities to see it, but it’s not likely that you will do so. On average, the horizon remains peripheral in our days that are made up of things to do rather than to look at.
Our visual field is full of written words, documents, office furniture, lifts, stairs, buildings, roads and, in general, very little colour. Between us and the horizon there is always at least one obstacle, be it a screen or a big grey building, preventing the eye from looking down invisible tracks on which the train of ideas that makes us what we are and can take us far, far away. "Vast horizons generate complex ideas, little horizons restricted ones", Victor Hugo said, for this reason it’s very important to choose carefully where to live, because each day spent in a place can equally deprive us of the beauty or fit like a tailored suit.
Mayo, for example, offers a handful of horizons, one after another, immense, variable, green, blue, silver. A place like this cannot fail to guide those who live there towards the future, nor can it be forgotten by those who once went there, cutting through the distant horizon that the land provides us. Perhaps at one time, it was thought that hope could be found along the line that distinguishes the sky and the sea and that it was necessary to move down there to have a better life, to build opportunities.
However now, in Mayo, the music has changed, the spirit of the people has changed and you no longer look with your eyes. It’s nonsense to believe that the sky starts where the horizon begins, instead you look with the soul, perfectly conscious of how the horizon is a mirror of the perspective that each of us can find within ourselves, without moving an inch, simply under the sky, valuing the viewpoint and its history rather than where your eyes take you. The vast horizons of Victor Hugo no longer represent the place in which ideas migrate, but the means by which ideas are born, remaining children of their land; and Mayo is becoming the home in which the future has chosen to live, to be an interpreter of dreams and shared and achievable hopes of those who live in Mayo, of those yet to live there and of those who are warmly invited to return.
