The Same Lives

What follows is a series of my musings about the idea of potential. I wonder what you might think about it.

It's in birth and death that we are all equals. We all live different lives in between, but lives that only want to be complete, full, are exasperatingly small and impossibly large, all at once.

We all share one thing at birth - potential. And the one thing we share when we die? Potential unfulfilled. I don't interpret this as failure, something about which we should despair, or that we ought to suddenly strive day and night to fulfil that potential. We can't name potential, not until we reach it. At our birth we have no idea what that is. At our passing from this world, we can probably only make guesses.

Inevitably, when someone dies young, a version of the phrase so much wasted potential leaves people's mouths. The earlier the death, the more often it's thrown about. I have asked myself to think carefully about that. How would I understand what that means? What might be my perception?

It helps me to go to the science. For example, what's "potential energy"? It's an amount of energy that hasn't been released yet. It's stored energy that exists as a result of the position of an object in relation to a reference point. An end point, if you like. If one transfers this to a person's existence, this "potential" could very-well mean that one's potential is actually realised at the very moment of death. And that would mean that the whole of a person's life encompasses the release of that stored energy which is finally exhausted at the end of that life.

We can never know what that is, so using expressions like wasted potential or she had so much potential or please don't waste your potential is largely meaningless. We don't know what all that stored human energy will end up looking like. Perhaps it will release either as an act of murder or a significant discovery that will change the course of medicine. It may even be as unexpected and premature as the death of a child. A terrible thing to contemplate, yet the very moment that releases in another person the drive to nurture all children.

We are all much more the same than we think. We are all much more connected than we think. Our lives are not that much different. The only thing that truly differentiates us is when, where and how we were born and when, where and how we die.

The basic premise is still the same. We are beings of potential waiting to transform into action. The transformation begins at conception and ends when we die. And, in between, each of us is in control of how and in what direction we release that potential energy ... until it is potential no longer but a realised life.

Utterly unique.

Inevitably finite.

Yet amazingly universal.