The Fiction of Potential

We weeded and turned over the earth, mixing in manure and compost until the garden spot was black, rich and fecund. Then Little Bitty and I carefully sowed string bean seeds. Within days, they sprouted, strong and green. The tomato vines surged up and spread before I had a chance to stake them. The squash leaves were as big as my hand, their blossoms bright with potential.

Since then, one of the squash plants yielded a single yellow crookneck—then the leaves turned moldy and the vine split and rotted at the root. From three long rows of string beans I pulled one handful of beans—not enough for a meal. I got three plum tomatoes off the overgrown vine; the other plant dried up from the ground up. A few stunted green tomatoes are clinging futilely to the brittle, brown vine, but they have no way to pull nourishment from the soil.

It is sad to see. But sadder, still, is the nagging thought that my fruitless garden is a metaphor for my life. I am a woman of ideas. Lots and lots of ideas. Good ideas—for myself, for my career, for my partner and my child and my friends. “We could do this!” “You could do that!” “Isn’t this brilliant?” “Let’s try….” “Let’s start….” “Let’s do….”

The attic is full of boxes with concepts for novels, lyrics to songs, article ideas, beginnings of business plans. A publishable thesis manuscript, unpublished. Three issues of a lovely newsletter, now defunct. Just over my head—nestled into fluffy, itchy, pink insulation—live boxes and boxes of potential. My potential. Defunct. Fruitless.

Carolyn Hax, in her take-no-prisoners syndicated advice column, recently wrote: "Potential is fiction."

Fiction? Potential is something we hold up like a candle to light our way. We hire it. We vote for it. We marry it. We give birth to it—and nurture it with our whole hearts. Because we have been taught to believe in possibility. We have learned to believe that “may” or “might” or “could” or “should” is enough to stand on.

But in the movie Amistad, there is a scene in which Djimon Hounsou’s character— the enslaved Mende, Sengbe Pieh—is told by his American lawyer that something that “should” have secured their legal victory and freed Sengbe to return home to Africa, didn’t. Sengbe shouts in frustration, “What is this word ‘should’?” There was no translation for it in his language, he said. Either something happened or it didn’t.

And that is not fiction. We do or we don't do. We bear fruit or we don't. It doesn't matter how green the string bean plants are if there is nothing on them we can eat.

Potential is the story we tell ourselves so that we can sleep at night. Frankly, I’d rather stay awake if it means that I am doing something instead of making dreams that will disappear in the light of morning. I want to do more than just send up green leaves. I want to flower! What would it take for me to finally, decidedly bear fruit?

I have to admit that I am only a potential gardener. Once my vegetable plants were sturdily in the ground, I left them to their own devices. Though it has been scorchingly hot, I wouldn’t break the rules and cheat the water restrictions in our drought-stricken city. My approach to organic gardening is to leave it to The Gardener. I could have done more to nourish the plants and protect them from parasites and blight. I could do more for myself.

My first step is to step away from the notion that potential is something I can stand on. I have to remember what Iyanla Vanzant wrote: “There is nothing between doing and not doing that can be trusted.” Between doing and not doing lies the quicksand of potential. And that's no place from which anything can grow.