On a lengthy drive with my son he asks how his sister is coping in preparing for her German speaking exam. I take this as a significant show of affection as it is only a single step away from asking her himself which, for siblings only two years apart, is a rarity. Via my response the conversation moves onto school in general and the expectations put on children by the education system. Increasingly it seems that the idea of living up to our potential is unclear and nebulous at best, and at worst a destructive endeavour.
I always hope that my children will find and sustain their own level in the delicate balance between expectation and achievement. Sometimes I have seen it happen before my eyes, first beginning to buckle under the pressure, then moving through a period of rebellious defiance and finally seeming to ease into an uneasy peace between what is demanded and what they are prepared to deliver. My daughter especially has had periods where she would come home so frustrated and wound up at the mountains of homework and the dogmatic one eyed focus on exam grades that I thought she would burst. Sometimes she did, and sometimes she cried, neither ever providing the solution she searched for. At these times I would try to ask myself what I would want in the way of support and I knew it wasn’t solution, but validation. The permission to feel as we do freed from the necessity to change it.
As years have past and my own life has taken a number of twists and turns which I could not have foreseen I began to ask more regularly, what’s it all for anyway? Where are we trying so hard to get to? How do I reach my potential, and what is it anyway?
In my work as a therapist and as a coach a theme which crops us constantly is the connection we make between value and achievement. If I can pass this exam, climb that mountain, get that promotion, date that girl, run that time I will be more valuable than if I don’t. Apart from it being wholly inaccurate it is also, paradoxically, an approach that puts excessive pressure on us and is most likely to result in us failing to meet the standards we set even more alarmingly than we otherwise might have. We allow our very sense of self worth to teeter on the edge of “a thing” we may or may not be able to do. How disproportionate, how tragic.
There is as much I despise about the grammar school system as there is I value in it. Of course as a parent I am glad that my children are taught by, as far as I can see, talented and dedicated teachers and I am pleased that they are challenged and stretched. What I am less happy about is that there is such a myopic light shined on examination results, and that the notion of creating well rounded and thoughtful human beings with well honed softer and more ethereal qualities appears a much lower priority.
Stumbling across this post from Penelope Trunk seemed to echo my own existing thoughts. Why is it that we seem so hell bent on making more, being better, and most tragically of all, living up to a potential that is not defined, can never be and doesn’t exist in any case. What is my potential anyway? How could I possibly know whether or not I have achieved it and, most importantly of all, what on earth will I be missing on my walk through my own life because of all the time I am spending on trying to make it all better.
It’s bad enough when we get into our middle age and question what on earth we are doing to ourselves pressing on towards who knows what but I frequently see young people (mostly girls) in the final months of their school lives so strung out and anxious about the potential impact of “failure” that they appear almost burnt out before they have started their beautiful lives in earnest. This cannot be right and I am far from convinced that it helps us in the long run. Perhaps as valuable as a university degree is the experience of living away from home making new connections and learning about independence. Perhaps as valuable as starting a business which generates enough money to pay the bills is the experience of pitfall and failure along the way and what it teaches us about ourselves. We might focus on the tangible rewards but there are many more hidden beneath the horizon on which we fix our stare.
On top of all this we are not only told what we need to achieve but we are also told how we need to be, what to say, how to say it, how to look. It’s all bullshit. We have been trained to value extroverts above all else in modern society. We are brainwashed into thinking that charisma equals power and that power is all you need. We can chase that dream, trying to make the most of our potential, but it can so easily leave us crumpled in a heap. Realising potential is a broad church indeed and self acceptance is the only potential worth realising. In fact the greater the extent to which we are able to accept ourselves the easier it is to make the progress that we seek to make. Releasing demand by reminding ourselves that we are always enough is the very thing most likely to fuel our efforts to grow and develop in remarkable ways.
Apart from the myth about where constant striving for improvement may or may not lead us it also ignores a much more fundamental importance in our lives, the life itself. Hardly any of the time we spend here on earth is made up from moments of achievement. There are only so many times we can pass exams, win a race, land a great job, get a promotion, have a hot first date. What about the rest of the time? What are we doing, simply waiting for the next big moment? The idea of this is quite appalling. Finding joy and satisfaction in the apparent mundanity of our days is where the real gold lies, this, if anything, is a true manifestation of potential, our potential to take what we have and squeeze every last drop of goodness from it.
Of course I fall into the trap too. This week looking at my diary I noticed that Thursday was very quiet. A shadow passes across me leaving a faint whiff of failure, of doubt. “What if they stop coming?”. “What if you can’t pay the bills?”. When I started my business someone said to me “What will happen if the phone doesn’t ring?” I didn’t have an answer and, on reflection, if I had thought about one I might not have made the move in the first place. Life is lived best by stepping into the space that we have in front of us in the certain knowledge that nothing is certain. I don’t know what next Thursday will look like when I get there but I know that I will do my best to enjoy it when it does. That’s never beyond me or beyond any of us and it is a type of living up to potential which is never a myth.
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