Who in the hell decides what our potential is?
Here is a question that starts showing up
somewhere around sixty.
Did I
live up to my potential?
… And I have another question.
Who
the hell made the scale for living up to our potential??
Who decides what our potential was supposed
to look like in the first place?
A
bigger house? More money? The marriage that lasted? A corner office?
Kids who never screwed up? A retirement account big enough that the financial
planner kisses your ass when you see him?
Because if that is the scoreboard, an awful
lot of people are walking toward retirement convinced they somehow lost the
game.
Especially my generation, GenX.
We were the kids who came home from school,
let ourselves into the house, did our homework and made dinner for our single
parent.
We grew up having five television channels.
We were worried the Soviets might blow us up before dinner. If you wanted to
talk to somebody you had to call their house and risk getting their father on
the phone.
We watched factories close. We watched our
neighborhoods change. We watched our parents work thirty years for the same
company because there was supposed to be a pension waiting at the other end.
Then
some jagoff changed the playing field.
Companies downsized, jobs moved overseas,
and pensions disappeared. Technology showed up and told half the workforce that
everything they had learned for twenty years was obsolete.
Then came the dot-com crash, then September
11th, then years of war and terrorism. Then 2008 knocked some of us back to square one. Then smartphones arrived and everybody became available
twenty-four hours a day. Then a pandemic shut down the goddamn planet.
That is one tough road trip to take, and
somewhere along the way we made decisions.
Some were decent and some were fucking lousy.
We married the wrong person or stayed too
long at the dead-end job. Maybe we ended up quitting the right job. We bought
the wrong stock, or we didn't buy the right stock. We didn't call somebody
back. We didn't show up for lunch, or we didn't tell somebody we loved them.
Wait until Monday.
Wait until January.
Wait until the kids got older.
Wait until things settled down.
… And suddenly we are sixty fucking years old
and things don’t settle down.
That
is the part nobody explained to us when we were thirty. Time doesn't announce
itself when it leaves. There isn’t a guy standing by my bathroom door saying, “Jumbo,
just so you know, you are never going to get 1997 back.”
Procrastination is probably responsible
for more unrealized potential than failure ever was. Failure at least means you
swung the bat. Procrastination leaves the bat sitting on your shoulder.
I
think we have been looking at potential all wrong. Potential isn't one
destination. It is a thousand different trajectories.
At twenty-five your potential might have
been to become a writer at the Sun-Times. At forty it might have been saving a
marriage. At fifty it might have been becoming a better person. At sixty it
might be repairing a friendship, writing the book, helping your kids find their
way, mentoring somebody younger or finally becoming comfortable with the guy
staring back in the bathroom mirror.
We get fewer chances as we get older. That
is just the mathematics of time, but fewer isn't none. Maybe
potential was never about becoming everything we planned on. Maybe it was about
becoming something useful with whatever remained in front of us.
There is still another conversation, another
opportunity, another sunrise, another idea, and another wrong that can still be
made right.
Potential doesn't have a time clock. There is no
foreman punching your card at sixty-five. There is no closing bell that rings
and announces that whatever you were going to become, you are wearing it. At
sixty, potential changes from accumulation to contribution.
As
long as you are here, the trajectory can still change.
Maybe not dramatically. Maybe just a few
degrees, but anybody who has ever looked at a map knows that a few degrees over
enough distance can take you someplace completely different.
Someday, when people talk about us, they
probably won't spend much time discussing whether we maximized our potential. They
will remember what we did with it. Because in the end, our potential isn't just
part of our story. It becomes part of our legacy.
It is Tuesday morning and it never looked so good.
I’m already in, in a daydream…
