When I was young, I used to love to beg my sister to go playing in the nearby park on the teeter totter. It didn't take much convincing and I remember happy afternoons of blue skies in which every propitious potential my young life held was written in the fluffy blue above us as the see-saw rose. Even though many people think Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita is about pedophilia, one main strain in it has nothing to do with sexuality and a lot to do with youth and potential. In one section of Lolita, the narrator, Humbert Humbert, who is also Lolita's seducer or rapist, reminisces on the way young women of 16, 18 and 19 have lost the potential of the bloom that they held at 12 and 13. Having now bloomed, they are too old for the admiration that can only live inside the bubble of future expectation.
Perhaps financial analysts will have something to say about this as it relates to markets and "futures," but, from Lolita and from my own life experience, I see that potential is almost in its own category as a property and is not as related to the experience it is supposed to be a credit record of as we may think.
In our social ledger books, "potential" suggests just what the word means: the likelihood that as-yet-unmanifest value is held within an object, person or activity. This workshop has the potential to change our business. This light bulb will potentially brighten up my whole kitchen. And the important but critically amorphous "this student has potential." We rarely bother specifying what kind of potential a young person has. We may think that someone has technical potential or artistic potential, but we don't venture to pin it down very often. We are satisfied with "potential," because it does say what we mean. We mean that a person appears capable, bright, charming, handsome. And we translate this to "potential," because we assume that, somehow, these properties will morph into rocket fuel and the individual will be able to jet off into space, from which vantage point he or she will be able to see everything and, appropriately, engulf any sphere of interest with zeal, ability and success.
This and its softer social side is what 11-year olds experience when they are see-sawing on a teeter-totter in a pristine German park. They imagine dinner parties and knowing conversations. Words, people, histories, stories which to them now are a mystery but whose elucidation they look forward to. Information, work, value they will deliver to society, to other adults like themselves, to the families they will raise and the friends they will make. All this is a delicious future pot of fondue. But, just like Humbert Humbert's pot, which even in the tasting is not as flavorful as his mental musing over it are, this expectation dies with age and without much of the joy that an unraveling potential was supposed to deliver. The teenage years may be an exception. I think young people in puberty and early adulthood do feel as if the giant fondue pot is right in front of them, ready for the swimming in. But before they have had their fill and, in fact, just on the edge of the pond as they get going, a helicopter swoops in and picks them up out of the water, pulling on a harness that was already attached to their waist as if from birth. Inevitably, people lift out of the dipping pond and begin to focus. Instead of celebrating the manifestation of ephemeral dinner parties and fuzzy conversations on interesting topics about which they are now in the know, they schedule focused soirees, during which the main goal is to offend no one and to return social favors long overdue.
In other words, those adult worlds that looked spontaneous and gleeful from the child's perspective, become cloaked in responsibility. They become a chore.
We can easily say that this is a product of a child's misunderstanding. If the child could see clearly, he or she would understand that her parents, too, where not spontaneously enjoying themselves in laughter. They were also returning favors and building social bonds.
So, yes, there is a perspective shift here, a shift we commonly experience in our susceptibility to advertising, whose outer representation of reality is as pristine and as devoid of the messiness of true experience as a child's view of adulthood is, a seductively free state which we are bamboozeled into thinking will actually manifest if we purchase a product. As if owning a certain handbag will magically erase the bad memory of your boss from your mind.
Similarly perhaps, we build worlds around what we see as children. Worlds that are naive in their backstory. Or that have no backstory. Worlds which spontaneously materialize and evaporate at will when the next fruitful adventure is presented. It is maybe this tendency that promises the un-promisable to our 10-year-old playing brains. It is true that most things we dream about and vaguely expect as pre-adolescents do happen to us: we grow up, study at university, find jobs, get married, hold parties and have children. These events just don't have the blue-ey glow that my fluffy-clouds sky promised.
And neither do the lives of other people. I see 14-year-olds who bubble with interest, spunk and articulation and then they decide to study dentistry (say) and suddenly, the all-encompassing potential that I used to see in them collapses to a singularly. Whether dull or happy, it is just the tip of a needle compared to what I imagined they could have been part of.
Perhaps it is a matter of perspective and the life of he who sees interest in his work is interesting no matter the nature of the work - a kind of reverse advertising in which seemingly dull moments are transformed into perfection by the happy sensations of the person experiencing them. For these people perhaps, the potential they themselves saw in their early life is more fully manifested in adulthood than it is for the rest of us.
I am willing to concede that there is an element of personality that determines whether a person considers the magic of his youth to have evaporated in adulthood and, since most of the same kinds of experiences happen to most of us, it is easy to ignore the actual idiosyncrasies in life. Still, even with accounting for personality, it seems statistically true that children dream big and adults regret a lot.
My present theory is that a shift in perspective causes people to focus on the minutia around the events of their lives while the childhood projections focused on the images. So while the child saw the dinner-time laughter, the adult sees the reservations and the budget restrictions.
If this is all that accounts for the difference, I am happy, for it means that, with a little tweaking, the bright blue of our fluffy see-saw sky can be returned. Or, at least, the cardboard prop version of it can be gingerly slid onto the set of adult life and simulate successfully that which we used to see in the crystal ball of our grown-up future.
