Limits

Mediocrity has been on my mind lately.  I've been waging a debate with myself about how comfortable I am with being average.  (By average, I mean a personal average.  I think there's average on a social level, and then there's average on a personal level.  Let's say personal average is an equal division of the sum totals of your achievements from birth to present, with a median knowledge of what your day-to-day activities contain.)  There are some days when I think, "Yep, I'm content with not making my bed today, nor showering, and maybe I'll just sit around and do nothing."  And then there are days when I'm in a rage because I need to be challenged intellectually or physically, to feel the threat of failure on a grandiose scale, if only to reminded that I'm alive and breathing.  And on both occasions, I wonder if I could be happy with living at either extreme.  "Of course not," I think to myself, "Because you get bored easily, you're too innately curious, you love vacation, and life is all about striking a balance anyways."  So the question always lingers: how comfortable could I be if I was average?

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a household where the word "potential" was used as a weapon.  Any breach of discipline or feat of under-achievement was promptly attacked as unfit and not in keeping with my "potential".  There was no excuse for not using all the gifts in my psyche to their full capacity.  From birth until the day I moved coasts, I was suffocated by the idea of my Potential.  What was it?  Potential: that unknown, immeasurable limit of individual human greatness; the tiny lettering on an uninflated balloon.  As far as I could glean, my Potential was limitless and thus anything less than stellar (effort) was unacceptable.  But even more frightening was the thought of, where does it stop?  How will I know I've reached my Potential?  Everyone supposedly has "potential", and we all assume this means "capacity for greatness" (re: success), but to what end?  Forget family legacy; genetics is just a theory in this arena.

The frightening moan of Potential is the assumption that you have an unlimited capacity for growth, for development.  And it's upsetting to see that capacity diminished, uncultivated, or even blatantly disregarded.  How often does it happen that when someone dies (or severely screws up) we grieve the loss of their Potential?  It's everywhere, the threat of Potential loss, and you can feel it creeping into your soul each time you quit, stop trying, or feign indifference or carelessness.  Potential is a dangerous word, because its hit-man is that other daunting term, Disappointment.  And Disappointment is perhaps The Worst, because itself contains an unlimited potential for feeling really, really, bad about oneself.  Between the two, there's no limit as to how high or how low you can go.

There's no denying that the impetus for progress runs parallel to the idea of potential in our daily lives.  At work, there's an urgency for forward motion, accompanied by that little voice reminding you of how capable you are of achieving the results.  There are tasks to be done, and it's only a matter of how smart/efficient/creative/annoying you are which will help determine their end.  You know there's applause and relief pending completion of said objective; alternatively you could just half-ass it, lose your job, and go live under a bridge.  So you get it done (or not) and perhaps that little voice nags at you when you return home, reminding you that maybe you didn't do enough.  But does there ever come a time when we say to ourselves, I'm just not capable of this...?

I think that's the curse of running a marathon.  I know I'm capable of it, so the Potential exists.  But now that there's a time stamp on the previous record, I'm unsure of my limits.  Last time, I just needed to finish, that was the litmus.  I'm certain I can finish one again, but will I be able to do it faster?  And regardless of the outcome, will that be enough?