pretty much every day for the past couple of months, i've come up against that bogeyman that's shadowed me for most of my life - my potential. it used to be friendly. it used to be that i liked when people noticed it, commented on how prominent it was, tripping along beside me - or, more like, in front of me. in truth, i feel like i was often preceded by my potential and the rest of me was the shuffling, crooked, nascent thing that had yet to catch up to the majestic spectre of Who I Could Become.
these days, potential is lagging behind. the problem is, i still feel so much like that unformed beast travelling in its wake. i keep trying to slow down, waiting for potential to overtake again. waiting for the moment when we might coincide. i'm beginning to realize that that might never happen. and that's more than a little bit disturbing.
even more unnerving, though, is that i've realized that potential has a toehold in the personal as well. when j and i were new, everything was potential. we could be anything and everything to each other. we made new promises, scratched out the lines of commitment in the blank blank slate of our glorious untapped future. three years later, i realize that now we have a history. whatever glory we're bound for doesn't live in potential, in that mysterious future us that we cast ourselves into when we were new. the here and now, baby. that's where it's at. of course, none of this is rocket science. common sense more like. a kind of naive stating of the obvious. but what hasn't been so obvious to me, until now, is that i can't keep living in the potential of who i could be in this relationship either. the "who i want to be when i'm with you" - or worse, the "who i am and have always intended to become" - doesn't hold water without some evidence of being leakfast in the present. i don't have the luxury of deferring my true and good self to another time or place. truth be told, i don't have the desire to defer it anymore. the downside to that, though, is that if i don't project that impossibly perfect me into that impossibly perfect future, i've kinda gotta be okay with the me that's sitting here in the present. and man, some days, it really isn't pretty...
*
this bit of poem is so out of context. a verse pulled from a longer piece. but i like it on its own, too, and think it maybe has something to say for me even so.
Land to Light On
...
V vi
Light passes through me lightless, sound soundless,
smoking nowhere, groaning with sudden birds. Paper
dies, flesh melts, leaving stockings and their useless vanity
in graves, bodies lie still across foolish borders.
I'm going my way, going my way gleaning shade, burnt
meridians, dropping carets, flung latitudes, inattention,
screeching looks. I'm trying to put my tongue on dawns
now, I'm busy licking dusk away, tracking deep twittering
silences. You come to this, here's the marrow of it, not
moving, not standing, it's too much to hold up, what I
really want to say is, I don't want no fucking country, here
or there and all the way back, I don't like it, none of it,
easy as that. I'm giving up on land to light on, and why not,
I can't perfect my own shadow, my violent sorrow, my
individual wrists.
- Dionne Brand
Barenaked Ladies - What A Good Boy
1 comment:
i think by its very nature, potential is always someplace you are not. i see it less as something to be achieved (because that implies that there is a finite amount of it, and i would hate to think there are limits to what we can do with our lives), and more as something that will *always* be two steps ahead - whose job is impelling growth, teasing you out of standing still.
and that in no way precludes being happy in the present moment :)
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