The Problem of Diminishing Potential
By Susan Pomeroy | April 11, 2008
Possibility and potential. So much more exciting than “reality” or “past.” I love preparing the soil, planning the garden, planting the seeds, watering, encouraging growth. But once the vines bear fruit, I lose interest. Harvest? No thanks. The tomatoes shrivel on the vine because I don’t really care about picking or eating them. For me, the joy is in the growing. In fact, for me, picking and eating the fruit merely confirms the beginning of the death cycle. Stripping the plant of its fruit, letting it dry up, wither and die. So, in a strange gesture to the plant’s potential, I find myself preferring not to pluck or pick. If it must die, let it go on its own, in its own time.
Tree fruits, on the other hand, are a different story. A tree is so much more permanent, enduring through season after season, flowering and fruiting and shedding, year upon year. I love picking apples, peaches, cherries. Enjoying the offerings of the noble tree, which provides beauty, scent, color, shade, tranquility, and sometimes, even drama, throughout the decades of its life.
A tree is always potential. When its limbs are bare, the entire year’s potential is hidden in the roots. When pink apple blossoms cluster on the branch, the round fruit is a delicious possibility hidden in a cloud of fragile petals. And when apples redden in the sun and weigh the branches farther towards the earth each day, autumn’s possibilities lurk: fallen fruit rotting on the ground, fermenting cider, the last of the pies… and finally again, bare branches.
What I really want to say is, that sorrow is all around. A day moves past its zenith, a tomato ripens and shrivels on the vine, a life passes its midway mark and meanders quickly or slowly to a close. I don’t like having to get older. I don’t like my parents, my friends, getting ill and dying. I don’t like seeing long-ago lovers many years later and realizing that they never grew into the potential that I once loved in their youth. I don’t like suspecting that I never grew into mine, either.
Now, at 54, what’s to be done? I see older folks all around me, finishing graduate programs, taking exercise classes, traveling, writing. Goddess, grant me the inspiration to outgrow my disappointments and to continue to become more awake and more alive even as summer slides into autumn. But it feels harder to find joy as the pure potential of my life stretching out before me diminishes.
Over 50? How do you keep going, physically, emotionally, spiritually? How do you deal with diminishing potential?
Topics: out of sight of land |
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