Drive

What a delightful and appropriate choice for the first topic. I think that potential is the most appropriate topic there is for a blog. And a blog about creativity no less? Why potential, if you excuse the redundancy, is the only place to start.

I love potential. But then again, I am an American. Love of potential is engrained in our national DNA. For all the homeliness that Americans purport to desire, there is a constant longing in all our hearts for something different. Something better. We were born of discovery, of invention, of creation. America is the land of the self-made man and of unspoiled land. It is the uncharted possibility of cities of gold, second chances and change that people seem to need to believe in. Even the conservative nostalgia of a better and simpler time is, at its core, a desire for pure unspoiled potential. There is a perfect world out there and somehow we can get to it and, whether or not we admit, it is very attractive.

I don’t mean to say that America is has a special quality in this love of potential. Of course it is felt among any number of people. I do however think that because we are on this half of the globe we have the idea of utopia in the firm back of our mind. We live where they came looking for all those things. And we are still looking, even if we can’t remember what we were looking for in the first place. But potential and hope are so closely related, that I wonder if we need the promise of jet packs, or people loving their neighbor, or the good old days like we need air. Do we need potential, whatever that means to us, to keep us moving?

Because it certainly is not the destination that we want. Not really. It almost never is preferable to have the actual thing to the potential of that thing. Jen, when you say it is the worst kind of life to have reaching your potential, I get was you mean. It is like peaking in highschool and spending the rest of your life thinking of going back. It is always about the fantasy of how great it will be. Because far too often the realization of potential looks like this:

There are too kinds of energies at work right there. The potential energy that has been building up in the movie between Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross and the release of that energy when Ben bangs on the window and shouts to Elaine into pure kinetics. They run until they are at rest on the back of the bus. Once stopped and stationary, reality sets in. And the dread and uncertainty of it flashes across their faces as they continue to try to manage a smile. That bus is going nowhere.

When you ask what I want this blog to be shaped like, I am unsure what to answer. If it is a living breathing thing than surely we would only kill it, at least a little, to tie it down. I think thought the structure of a conversation works nicely to keep us meandering for a good long while. What do you think?

-James