Living Down to Your Potential

Are you everything you should be? Have you an explanation for your current level of personal and professional achievement? Do you ever wonder if this is as good as it gets?

BritBox was pretty sure that you didn’t know the answers. No biggie.

Self-examination is good if it’s not taken to extremes. The guy in the next cubicle with the annoying personal habits could certainly use a little of it. That lady down the street with thirty-five cats could probably use a lot more of it. Where do you fit in? When no one is looking, you can’t help but check yourself out in any reflective surface you pass by. How embarrassing when you found out there were people on the other side of that mirrored-glass office building façade! Don’t feel bad, they would have done the same thing themselves. What are you looking for when you look into the dreamy, haunted eyes of the Other You? Hopefully, both parties are measuring up, but that is very unlikely. The subject is about more than just monitoring the flabbiness of your belly or hips: it’s about checking the flabbiness of your heart’s desire. Has your heart’s desire been exercising daily?

Here’s how it works: right about the time you separate yourself from your parents’ lives and begin the construction of your own adult identity, your judgment is clouded by the fact that you know everything and are going to live forever. That part of your life is sharp and clear; the colors are brighter and the sensations are more intense. The middle part of your life has got a lot to do with earning a living and finding someone who will love you, although your bad habits and decisions seem to conspire to undermine the job and relationship. This middle part is kind of a blur. The last part of your life is mostly about the realization that you don’t know as much as you thought, and that the long sweet sleep of oblivion draws inescapably nearer. This part is kind of rounded off and fuzzy, and there is a persistent feeling that perceptions used to be bigger and lasted much longer. If you did OK during the middle part, the last part is not quite so bad.

Experience and accumulated knowledge are not to be underestimated, if you live that long. It’s kind of a Darwin thing. Determination and confidence are pretty handy, too, no doubt about it. Luck is nice when you can get it, but trying to find some is like looking for the money you’ve loaned your friends: it’s all around you, you know it’s there, but you can never find it when you need it. But there is something else that can make a difference.

Passion. It’s the electric shock that makes you jump back up from the floor after you’ve been knocked out. It’s the hot smoky fire that keeps your Special Someone warm at night. It’s the grease that lubricates achievement, and it’s the secret spark that ignites redemption. Passion pushes you beyond what’s reasonable, all the way to what’s right.

If you try to make other people happy without being happy yourself, you are giving them gifts that you have shoplifted. You will neither inspire anyone nor motivate them if you are cursing your circumstances and flirting with your own self-destruction. Nobody asked you to be a saint, and the openings for angels were filled long ago, but there is a very important part that you must surely play:

Be yourself. The self you really can be, not that grumpy, unmotivated, disillusioned one that frustrates you, and annoys your friends and family.

The Other You will thank you the next time you pass a mirror.