Potential

An image of a tree in the field, a very banal but yet poignant image.

When I look at a tree, I realise how many years it took for it to grow and develop. To us, this is just a tree like any other. To the tree itself is the legacy of so many other trees.

The plant itself may just provide you with oxygen to breathe, but to the tree you are the source of its nutrient and source of life, a true inter relatedness between human and nature.

Where I am on holiday, the sun is getting hotter and hotter; it has now reached 34C but feels like 37, and without having the surrounding trees am sure it would be even hotter due to lack of shade and the capture of the sun by the leaves.

So why am I talking about the trees so much? In truth, I have been reading and listening to a blog from another author who is talking about the various parts of this amazing plan and how it relates to us as humans in the wider context.

If you have been reading my entries in the past few months; I have been talking and asking you to consider your own history as a preamble to your own being. And if you have been interested, then perhaps you have picked up on the fact that in the past few entries, I challenged you to consider your ancestry, the history of your own life, and other impactful aspects of your existence, inclusive of a map of your friends or family who have been most influential in your life. And if you put all that information on a chronological timeline with all the aspects as different streams, what you will notice is that, in fact, you see a structure emerging. With perhaps you, as the seed of this whole exploration. With your parents branching out from you and then all other aspects of you branching out into hundreds of branches that can either be traced forward as your projection of you, or backwards as a point of reference for your very existence.

In fact, if you were to put yourself in the middle, then you would become the potential of your parents’ projection of their views, ideas and hopes, and they have been the potential of their own parents, and your grandparents the potential of their own parents and so on leading back for generations. So, when you sit there contemplating your existential crisis, whose crisis are you actually contemplating, your own, your parents’., your grandparents’ or your great great great great great great great grandparents’?!

When you sit there reacting with anxiety or depression or excitement or sadness and anything in between, is it truly you reacting or is a latent memory in your cells doing it? That spider, that butterfly, that snake, that allergy to peanuts – is it you, or is it something from hundreds of generations back that are resurfacing? What gene in you has activated for you to have this reaction? The dreams you have at night, are these your dreams or are they memories of your unlocked genetical memory?

What is your potential that perhaps you are yet to achieve?

The tree has reached its minimal potential, but the outcome is yet to be determined. It may stand there for a year or it may well be there hundreds of years from now. It may just stay upright or sprout a new tree nearby, we will ever know.

Time to take out your diary and take some notes when answering the questions.

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