I have a feeling there are people in our world who don’t think the same way I do about floor cleaning. Perhaps some think that’s for someone else, someone not as educated, intelligent, superior, rich, or important in some other way. But anyone who’s walked barefoot across a sticky, gritty floor surely thinks floor cleaning has some importance. I have to admit my feelings about me doing any floor cleaning tend to fluctuate depending on how long it’s been since I’ve cleaned one, as well as the number of years behind me with their resulting aches and pains, and whether my once-sprained ankle tells me rain is on the way. I no longer feel that my floors need to be cleaned quite as often as I did when I lived with several house mates and we took turns cleaning them on an agreed-on schedule. Long before that, when I was young enough to clean them with relative ease, somehow the importance of doing so escaped me. So, so much for floor cleaning - at home. But I’m not referring to that floor cleaning most of us do or don’t do at home when I ask the question in my title. There is an invisible army that keeps our more public floors clean, in businesses and various government institutions, and it’s them I refer to. I consider them awfully important, even though they’re generally ignored and unappreciated. After all, why would anyone want that job? That’s my point.
It’s the “meets their potential” portion of my question that troubles me. Defining potential is a little like trying to define God or infinity, or evil, isn’t it? What is the potential for the growth of a corporation? For the misdeeds of a despot? For a hunter’s kills? What is our reproductive potential? Our potential to feed, clothe and shelter everyone on the planet, and at what potential population? What is our potential for technological advancement, genetic modification, weapons development, or polluting the environment? Potential can seem rather miraculous, as in the work of an Einstein, Darwin, Salk or Pasteur. But potential isn’t necessarily always a good thing.
This isn’t the first time this question has crossed my mind, and I’m not the first to ask it, or something like it. But what got me to thinking about it today was a blog mention of the The National Medals Laureates of Science, Technology and Innovation, one of whom is Steven Sasson, the inventor of the digital camera. My curiosity led me to the Wikipedia page about Sasson, where I learned he’s an electrical engineer. There are many things an electrical engineer can do with his or her knowledge and skills, and most don’t do anything like invent the digital camera. So what made the digital camera Sasson’s particular calling, and why don’t others meet the same potential? Why was that one of his? Or maybe that isn’t his potential at all. He’s still alive and maybe there’s something else more important, or greater in impact than that invention that he has yet to do or has already done. I don’t know. The digital camera is a pretty big advancement, and because of it I have saved a lot of money on film and even have trouble recalling when I last bought film. But I’m an amateur, and I know that many photographers still use film, some in order to obtain qualities that they can’t achieve with even the best digital cameras. Maybe Steven Sasson’s greatest potential is something else.
How do we know what our potential is and whether we should meet it? And in what direction? It seems to me that potential is spherical in shape and extends in all directions. Was Robert Oppenheimer thinking about meeting his potential when he directed the development of the atom bomb? Was Abraham Lincoln meeting his potential when he abolished slavery? What about the idea of learning to live within our limitations, of acceptance? When is good enough good enough? What is the potential, for instance, of capitalism? How rich is rich and how poor is poor? If everyone meets their capitalistic potential, will we all be rich? Then who will clean the floors? Are some supposed to be content to earn so little they can barely make the rent? Is that simply their potential?
In my lifetime so far I’ve known a few people that I would call rich, those who don’t really need to, in fact never needed to worry about making ends meet, but who could in spite of their own perceived limitations do many things and enjoy life in a way that most people who hold minimum wage jobs would consider a great luxury. I’ve also known people who did jobs like cleaning floors, changing linens, collecting trash, and so forth. I’ve known even more, far too many, who live paycheck to paycheck, constantly worrying about next month, or the next emergency and how they’ll get through that. I honestly can’t think of any particular character flaws, qualities or differences in goodness, personal merit, or morals that mark a significant difference between these groups of people. Most of their differences had to do with luck. What family they were born into, what race, what neighborhood, what economic circumstances, what they were taught at an early age, and in some cases perhaps level of intelligence, though that seems to make the least difference.
Too many college students either have mental breakdowns or commit suicide (according to US suicide statistics, suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students) while attempting to “meet their potential,” an as yet undefined potential in lives as yet so brief. It’s difficult for many people to adjust to marriage, to having children, to starting careers, advancing in careers, doing without careers or direction in finding the next job or any job, to seeing their children leave the nest, retiring, or facing a loss of independence in old age (where by the way we find the highest and most alarming rate of suicide). It seems to me that all these problems, these stirrings of anxiety, discontent, fear (perhaps predominately fear of life rather than death), have to do with our ideas about human potential. What will we do with our lives and what will we leave behind, and what happens to us in the meantime? What will give our lives meaning or make them bearable day to day? Where does this pressure to achieve come from and why is it necessary? If it’s an external force pressuring us, a cultural one, where did it come from and what is its purpose? Is it better for our perceived potential to meet parental, societal or cultural expectations, or for them to meet our own individual needs, aspirations, and what Joseph Campbell called following our bliss? How do we get others to step back and let us get on with doing that?
What about those jobs we tend to consider so unimportant but which we couldn’t live without someone else doing, such as picking the fruit we eat, collecting the trash, changing hotel linens, serving our eggs, and so forth? Who cleans Bill Gates’ toilet? or the President’s? What if the surgical team that might potentially save a wealthy person’s baby born with a birth defect instead all decided to drop out of college and clean floors for a living? Might their jobs, for instance, sanitizing an operating room, be equally important to the survival of the infant? Might not others have gone to medical school in their place and be there to do the surgical part of the job? Maybe the surgeons would have been lousy floor cleaners, because it bored them to tears so they cut corners, and if the others who were more willing to do such a menial task, but weren’t quite as good at biology or chemistry, or were a bit squeamish about using a scalpel, hadn’t decided to clean floors the best they could, an infection caused by dirty floors would have killed the baby. All these are potentials, albeit unlikely ones in the generally perceived scheme of things, but they merit consideration if one is to honestly explore this question of human potential and purpose.
How many attempts at living a Utopian existence have ended in disillusionment, divisiveness, corruption of authority, or an inability to face the realities of survival or, again, day to day existence?
You may be wondering where I’m heading with this, and I’m sorry to say I don’t have the answers. This question of human potential is one of those questions that has no single correct answer, not a cultural one and not even an individual one. One person’s potential may be to get into college in the first place, to be there at all, as many people have struggled to do. But college isn’t for everyone, apparently, or even necessary for many, and the trouble with using examples is that most famous people are famous for meeting potentials most of us won’t likely meet. Everyone can’t be an Einstein or Oppenheimer, or Steven Sasson. I think the most important thing we can do with this question is relate it to ourselves as individuals. Ask it, think about it, and not worry overmuch that there are no concrete answers. Unasked, I think it presents grave dangers in either direction, of going too far or not going far enough. Perhaps answering it poses just as great a danger. But the question is important to consider, and possibly, just possibly, thinking about it now and then is the most sane thing we can do, especially if we ask why. Why should that be my potential? Why worry so much about potential? Another danger may lie in forming too rigid notions about one’s perceived potential, no matter what one’s background. People can get carried away, and miss the answers right under their noses while trying to meet their potentials. What if Alexander Fleming had doggedly tidied his lab on returning from vacation, thinking he’d never get anywhere if he didn’t clean up his act, and consequently never noticed that one culture that the “mould juice” later to be called penicillin had killed? Perhaps another would have made the discovery, but history would no doubt have unfolded differently.
What potential should any young person, middle-aged person, or elderly person strive to meet? Is it a matter of destiny, calling, choice, or all of these? Is meeting one’s potential a moral question? If so it has the most gray area of any moral question I’ve encountered. Yet it is treated, when we insist that young people meet their potential, as if it’s a clear and obvious, simple to answer question. Is it any wonder so many young people go off to college and meet another potential, one their parents for some mysterious reason rarely consider when they send them off to meet their potential, that of partying until all hours and/or eventually dropping out? Or having mental breakdowns or killing themselves?
Jung wrote about something called enantiodromia, which is Greek for running to the opposite, and he said it was the unconscious acting against the wishes of the conscious mind. What pressures are young people’s unconscious minds running from, or answering, when they act in complete opposition to the potential that they went off to college to meet? Could it be those expected potentials were not theirs at all but those their parents or culture or potential employers imposed on them? Isn’t it interesting how this so-called potential we’re told to strive for with all our might is never a guarantee? Perhaps the young people in question have no idea what they really want. Perhaps their parents don’t either. Perhaps it’s wrong to place the moral “should” on anyone’s potential, even our own.
Do this, this, and this. Go to college, earn a degree, enter a career, excel at that, marry, have children, and you will meet your potential. Whatever that is.
What are the potentials? Where am I going with this? Should I? Dare I? Can I? How far will I go?
Should I?
When all is said and done, who will clean the floors?
