Gestation Period

How can you determine a person's potential? Is there a trick to it?

Toward the end of last month I spent a week with my father's mother and stepfather. Years before I was born, my grandmother divorced my biological grandfather and later married for a second time. During my time with the two of them, she told me that her second husband had seen in her a unopened flower bud that had yet to bloom. And she strongly feels that over the course of the last 30 years, she has been able to develop into the person she was supposed to become during the first 50 years of her life. Interestingly, I see in her second husband nearly all of the traits of her first husband that she says suppressed her development.

I wanted to know what my grandfather (her second husband) knew that I didn't. "How do you look inside someone and see what she's capable of? Is there a trick?" I asked. He laughed. "I have no idea. I don't think there's a trick, though."

Okay, so I didn't get an answer to that question. But I had another one: Why couldn't my grandmother see for herself that she wasn't developing to her fullest? That's a question I decided not to ask aloud.

But maybe that's just the way it is. Maybe people don't explicitly realize when their development has stalled. Maybe they have only a vague feeling of ennui. And was it in fact the characteristics of my grandmother's first husband that held her back? Were they really to blame? Or was it merely her perception of their culpability, and her subsequent resentment of them (and him), that made divorce the only course of action?

This fall I'm going back to school. It's comfortable and lazy to think it will be a period of great personal development. I say "comfortable and lazy" because it's a deferment of action. Why should I wait until then? What would the-person-I-want-to-be do in my position?

I'm off to go learn something.